The Lady of the Mountain
by Flashfyre5
Summary: Ranma Saotome, now 31, lives alone on the side of a mountain, as a woman. Nobody knows who she is-not even her name-but when a wandering martial artist asks Ranma to teach him, bits of the past she thought long gone begin to reappear. Complete.
1. The Lady of the Mountain

Disclaimer: I don't own any of this.

The Lady of the Mountain

by: Flashfyre5

Chapter 1: The Lady of the Mountain

Ranma pretended not to see the man as he finished climbing the ridge that elevated her little farmstead from the valley where the river that irrigated it ran. Instead, she continued to plant her rice, calf-deep in the cool water that irrigated one of the three paddies that would sustain her through the year. The man was tall, for a Japanese fellow, but not unusually so, with close-cropped brown hair and chocolate eyes. He was dressed as a martial artist; that is to say, grubbily, with an enormous camping pack slung easily over his shoulder. She guessed his age at somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty, as he came close enough to her paddy for her to see the wrinkles that were just starting to form around his eyes and mouth—just about her age. He waited for her to notice him. Ranma kept working.

"Are you her?" he finally asked. "The lady of the mountain?" Ranma didn't answer. "Akane?" Ranma hid her wince.

"That's not my real name," she said, straightening. "They just call me that 'cuz of my hair." She flicked her red pigtail over her shoulder.

"Why don't they know your real name?" he asked.

"'Cuz I don't tell people my name."

"Oh." He blushed a bit, and looked up at the peak of Maru-san, behind her. It wasn't a particularly large mountain, especially compared to its far greater brothers to the northwest, but it was plenty high enough that it would probably still be snow-capped come August. Even now, in early April, it was cool enough that Ranma had chosen to wear long pants and a long-sleeved red cotton shirt, rolled up just enough that they wouldn't get wet in the frigid waters of the rice paddy.

"Well, I'm Taizo. Hashimoto Taizo I saw you at the tournament last week, and...," he paused, as Ranma sighed and shook her head. "...And I'd be honored if you'd teach me," he finished halfheartedly.

"What's your story?" Ranma asked. Taizo looked startled for a moment, then opened his mouth to respond. Ranma cut him off. "Let me guess. Your old man ran a dojo somewhere, and he taught you everything he knew... black belt, definitely, maybe even a dan ranking. You went off to college, got a business degree, and went to work, forgetting all about dear old dad. I'm betting he croaked a year or two ago, and now you suddenly have to inherit the school, but you're not a master." Ranma paused, and scratched her neck. "That about right?"

"Well, no," Taizo replied. "At least, I hope not. I talked to Dad about a month ago, and he's doing fine. Says the dojo's never been busier. Anyway, I got my mastery when I was seventeen." He grinned a bit. "Get people coming up here often asking you to teach 'em?" Ranma grinned a bit, and started to slosh her way to the edge of the rice paddy.

"Mostly just after the tournament every year. I swear, we hide it behind a damn mountain so we don't scare the locals when we bust out the fun moves, but someone always blunders in on us," she said. "I didn't see you there this year. You didn't fight?"

"Got there late. Besides, I'd heard that the Sapporo tournament was pretty small," Taizo said, and he unshouldered his pack. It thudded into the soft turf heavily enough to send ripples across the water of the rice paddy, and Ranma arched an eyebrow at the weight. He stretched, arching his back.

"Not a lot of us that can toss ki around anymore," Ranma said, and climbed onto dry land. She sat down on a white stone crag, and started to dry her feet on a towel she'd left there, next to her soft-soled kung fu shoes. "Hokkaido's not exactly known for its martial arts either." Taizo shrugged.

"I don't train to fight, anyway," he said. "Haven't had to outside of training in about four years. Would be six, but some bikers tried to jump me outside of Nagano."

"You sound like you've been on the road a while," Ranma said, slipping her shoes on. Taizo nodded.

"Nine years or so," he said. Ranma whistled.

"I bet there's a story there," she said.

"I'll tell it to you if you're willing to train me," he said, and grinned.

"Nice try."

"Can't blame a guy for trying." Ranma chuckled.

"No, I guess I can't." She looked up at him from her perch on the rock. "I guess I could give you the same deal I give the guys at the tournament. Get a point on me and I'll give you a lesson. Get a fall in on me and it'll be a technique."

"You ever had to make good on that?" Taizo asked.

"Not once in ten years," Ranma grinned ferally. He chuckled and shook his head.

"That's not really what I'm here for," Taizo admitted. Ranma arched an eyebrow and waited for him to continue. "My focus is in hard forms—kempo and karate based—but that kind of fighting has weaknesses."

"No more than the soft forms do," Ranma countered.

"True, but I need to know the soft forms enough to be smart when I have to deal with them," he said, and Ranma nodded slowly in understanding. "I haven't found anyone yet that's good enough to really break me of my bad habits. I saw you at the tournament, though. It was like you were made of air." Ranma didn't say anything for a while.

"I don't really teach. Not seriously," she said. Taizo's shoulders slumped.

"But-" he began. Ranma held up a hand to silence him.

"Think for a minute," she explained. " I live alone on the side of a mountain, about two klicks from the nearest road, much less the nearest town. I'd be willing to bet money that I'm one of the better martial artists you've ever seen, but I only ever compete in one tournament a year, and a small, you've-gotta-know-a-guy-to-know-about-it kind of tournament where the only prize is free beers at the bar afterwards at that." She snorted. "It's not even a nice bar, either."

"I saw. There was barely enough room for the twelve of you in there," Taizo nodded, and sat down next to her on the rock. Ranma scooted a few centimeters away, even though he hadn't sat down particularly near her.

"Anyway, the short version is I want to be left alone, and alone means no pestering students," she finished.

"I bet there's a story there," Taizo shot back at her, and Ranma winced visibly.

"To say the least," she said. They were silent for a while. The wind picked up for a few moments, and caused a few little waves on the surface of the rice paddies.

"What was his name?" Taizo asked eventually. Ranma looked over at him, out of the corner of her eye.

"Her name," she said slowly, then grinned sheepishly. "You don't see many lesbian martial artists at our level, eh?"

"Her name, then," Taizo amended.

"None of your damn business," Ranma said sharply, then met his gaze directly. "How about you, Taizo? I don't care how much you love the Art, nobody leaves home for nine years unless they're runnin' from something." Taizo didn't answer right away.

"Was it a pretty girl? Break your heart?" Ranma pressed. Taizo shook his head and sighed a bit.

"A very handsome boy," Taizo admitted, then shrugged. "Guess we've got a little more in common than you might have guessed." Ranma didn't say anything, so he continued. "It was just... magic, then... poof. Gone. I never even got a chance to tell him I loved him."

"What happened?" Ranma asked. Taizo turned away.

"Can we talk about something else?" he asked, and Ranma could hear the huskiness of tears not quite spilled in his voice. She patted his shoulder.

"Nine year training trip," she said. "He must've meant a lot to you."

"The world," he whispered. Taizo rubbed his face with his left arm, then took a deep breath. "Sorry 'bout that," he said, facing her again, a wan grin set firmly in place. Ranma took the hint this time.

"Well, I've gotta admit that you're not the normal type of jackass that comes around here to bug me," she said, grinning back. "Here's the deal. You help me finish planting. If you can't get the third paddy planted before I finish the first and second ones, you're not worth my time anyway. After that, you've got until sundown to impress me with what you know of the Art."

"You're serious?" Taizo asked. Ranma nodded.

"You're looking for peace in the Art, and you haven't found it after nine years. I've gotta admit that I did the same damn thing myself, and if I hadn't had anyone to help me, I'd've been in a pretty bad spot. It's time I paid that debt," Ranma said.

"So, there is peace?" Taizo asked. "In the Art, I mean. You know." He paused. "It'll get better?"

"Do you want the 'sensei' answer, or the 'lady-of-the-mountain' answer? Ranma asked, standing and shucking her shoes.

"Both?" Taizo said, standing as well. His curiosity showed clearly in his arched eyebrows.

"Well, sensei says that inner peace is always just a careful thought away," Ranma answered. "In the Art, there is focus, control, and routine. It centers you, puts you in tune with yourself and the sprint of the world around you. In many ways, the Art _is_ peace." Taizo nodded.

"And the lady of the mountain's answer?" he asked.

"I live alone on a mountain kilometers away from the nearest other person. What do you think?" Ranma said, and shrugged. "Anyway, get to work. I'm faster than you are, and I've done this before."

Ranma slung a basket of sprouts over her shoulder and waded back into the first rice paddy. Taizo took another basket and walked toward the far one, nearest the edge of the little terrace that Ranma's farm sat on. The water from Ranma's irrigation could drain out there, if she wanted it to, into the little unnamed creek that ran down in the canyon below. Ranma watched Taizo carefully as he stepped into the water of the far paddy, and Ranma nodded to herself in satisfaction when nothing happened, then set to work.

- - - - -

Ranma and Taizo faced each other across a mostly-flat terrace of marbled white and glossy black volcanic stone About twenty meters behind Ranma, a big boulder of black obsidian rested near a small pool, the spring that fed the creek in the valley far below. Here and there, scattered at random around the field, boulders of varying size had been tossed ages ago by the ferocious power of Maru-san, but none like the obsidian crag. The sun hung low in the sky, but they were on the western slope of the mountain. Taizo felt sure that he had at least an hour before it finally dipped below the horizon.

"Ready?" Ranma quipped, slipping into a loose ready stance. Taizo looked a little startled for a moment, for some reason that Ranma couldn't discern, then closed his eyes and took a breath.

"Ready," Taizo said, and closed the distance between them in three swift steps. Two quick, probing jabs struck nothing but air as Ranma faded around them. A pause, followed by three more jabs, and a light foot hook, none of which had any greater success than the first two. Ranma danced back a few paces.

"C'mon. You're gonna have to do a lot better than that," Ranma taunted. Taizo expelled another breath and nodded.

"Right," he said, and his eyes hardened. The rush this time was many times faster than his first rush, and the jabs had real force now. Ranma melted around them again, but Taizo didn't stop. An elbow jab followed, then a leg sweep as Taizo's rotation continued. Ranma leapt upwards, then hopped off of Taizo's braced elbow as he crouched for the leg sweep.

Taizo sprang into the air from his crouch, still spinning. Ranma caught his outstretched leg, slipped underneath it, and flung him down. Taizo landed and grinned as Ranma's own descending kick came. It struck home in the middle of his chest, just where Ranma had aimed, but Taizo's hands closed around her ankle, and twisted, hard. Ranma crashed into the ground, the momentum giving Taizo a chance to rise into a crouch. He wrenched upwards, sending Ranma skywards again. She took the opportunity to kick him in the face, hard. He took the blow and tried to slam Ranma into the ground again, but suddenly her leg seemed to slip right through his hands, like mist. Overbalanced, he had no chance of stopping Ranma's own grapple and throw, which threw him a good twenty meters.

"You're not too bad," Ranma grinned, hopping from foot to foot as Taizo rose. Taizo grinned back, and there was a light in his eyes this time. "Not for a tough guy with no speed, at least."

"I'll show you speed," Taizo growled. Ranma leapt as she saw him tense for the charge—the skullcrushing roundhouse that Taizo had planned missed her by centimeters.

"Missed me again," she taunted, hopping backwards off of his shoulder. He surged again, the roundhouse kick aiming high this time. Ranma rolled underneath it, ceding ground.

"Houou Habatatta!" Taizo shouted, his rotation continuing. A jet of orange flame roared out from his mouth, arcing towards the ground in a crackling semicircle. Ranma pushed off, again taking to the air. Rather than follow her, Taizo tracked after her with his ki-powered flamethrower. Ranma knew that her upward momentum would stop before she made it out of the flamethrower's range, which she guessed at about ten meters.

"Mouko Takabisha!" Ranma countered, blasting a shot of blue ki toward her stationary opponent. As she'd hoped, Taizo abandoned the flamethrower, but he did not dodge.

"Kitei Toosenbou," he said, and the rock of the terrace cracked, then clamped around his feet and lower legs. Ranma's moukou takabisha crashed into him full-on, and Ranma nodded to herself, satisfied

"Waratteoni Endan!" Taizo cried from the still-smoking crater that Ranma's mouko takabisha had left; the stone clamps had kept him in place, and he aimed from memory alone, knowing that Ranma was now falling, and wouldn't be able to dodge effectively until she landed. A ball of roaring red ki, almost as big as Ranma's had been, fired back. As the smoke cleared, though, Taizo saw that his aim had been off; somehow, Ranma had floated just over the outer edge of his shot, her back arched like a high jumper around the curvature of the blast.

Ranma landed and darted towards Taizo, who immediately recognized the peril of his immobility and shook off his stone anchors. She was suddenly much faster than he was, much faster than anyone he had ever seen, and circled him rapidly. He tried to escape her circle, but a vicious jab to his kidney, which felt almost like several blows, sent him staggering back.

"Houou Habatatta," he tried again, desperation mounting. His flamethrower arced out again, trying to catch Ranma by sheer luck. There was suddenly an intense chill at his back, he had no chance to turn to face it.

"Hiryuu Shoten Ha!" Ranma shouted, and Taizo was lifted into blackness.

- - - - -

"Well, at least you're good enough to give me a workout," Ranma chucked as Taizo muzzily opened his eyes. The sky was the dark cobalt of not-quite-night, and Ranma crouched next to him, her red shirt seeming the color of dried blood in the twilight. "C'mon, up you go." Ranma pulled at Taizo's hand, and he pulled himself to a crouch, paused, then stood the rest of the way up unsteadily.

'Whoa," he said, then blinked a couple of times.

"That's pretty normal after a hiryuu shoten ha," Ranma said, her small, strong hands supporting Taizo as they began to walk back toward her farm. "It's powered by hot and cold ki. That flamethrower thing was just about the worst thing you coulda done."

"Now you tell me," Taizo groaned. The two picked their way down the narrow trail that connected Ranma's farm to the terrace they'd fought on. Taizo slowly became more stable, and by the time they left the tail, he was walking without Ranma's help, if still unsteadily.

"How'd you get out of my hold?" he asked finally. "I had you good, with both hands. You shouldn't have been able to break it." He stopped for a moment and cocked his head. "At least, not that easily."

"Lesson one: sensei knows more than you do. That's why she's sensei and you're not," Ranma said. "And if you're very good, I might even show you how I did that someday."

"You'll teach me, then?" Taizo asked, his eyes brightening. Ranma nodded.

"You're still rough, but you're way better than anyone I've fought in years," She answered. "Besides, I've been alone up here for a long time. Company might be nice for once." Taizo bowed deeply, nearly toppling over in his instability.

"Tank you, sensei. I promise, you won't regret it," He said, perhaps a bit stiffly.

"Enough of that. Stand up before you fall over," Ranma said. She motioned toward her house, then started walking toward it. "C'mon, and I'll show you my secret." Taizo followed.

Ranma's house was small, but it had been built with care. The walls were thick, and well-insulated, to keep out the winter's chill, but the windows were big, to let in summer breezes. Inside, there were only three rooms. Ranma's bedroom was largely empty, except for the futon that lay unmade on the floor. There was a little closet in the side of the wall, which had room for her clothes and bedding.

The main room was by far the largest, taking up about half of the total square footage of the building. In one corner was a sink, built into some western-style counters. A blue propane double-burner stove occupied one corner of the countertop, the white tank that fueled it sitting nearby on the floor. Next to the kitchen area was a big larder, filled with shelves upon shelves of glass-jarred foods, rice, and other necessities. In the remaining corner, a small table squatted. The only decoration in the room, or indeed the whole house, was a well-worn picture frame, which contained the photograph of a pretty young girl, her lavender hair short and her eyes brown.

The final room of Ranma's house, Taizo discovered, was the most special one, however. Though the room was no larger than Ranma's bedroom, she had painstakingly tiled it, floor, walls, and ceiling. Occupying about half of the room was a natural hot spring, so hot that it steamed. A big vent near the top of the room was open, and the infernal heat of the room spilled out of it, though this vent could be closed in the winter to heat the house.

"Wow," Taizo said, and Ranma smiled back at him.

"Yep," Ranma said, unbuttoning her shirt. "It's the same system that makes the hot springs for that onsen at the foot of the mountain. I found it up here and knew that this was my place." She tossed her shirt into a little bamboo basket, and started to strip her pants off. Taizo blushed, and looked away.

"Just holler when you're done," he mumbled, and reached for the door.

"Bah," Ranma exclaimed. "Strip. It's a small damn house, and it's not like you're not gonna see me around. In case you hadn't noticed, I aint exactly a fainting lily." Naked, she started to scrub herself off.

"But-" Taizo started.

"No buts. Get in or the deal's off," Ranma said abruptly, her eyes narrowing. Taizo bit his lip and began to disrobe. Ranma rinsed herself off and walked over to the basin, then slipped into the steaming waters with a hiss.

"Damn, it's hot today," she muttered, slowly sinking in up to her neck. She glanced over at Taizo, who was scrubbing himself, a towel tied around his waist. He finished, rinsed, then scooted over to the tub. Ranma's eyebrow arched, but Taizo slid into the water without either standing or removing the towel.

"Whats' the deal with the towel?" She asked when he didn't offer an explanation. "It's not like you've got anything I'm interested in." Taizo blushed.

"Well... we'll say it's not for your benefit," he said sheepishly.

"I thought you liked guys.'

"I do," Taizo said, his blush deepening either from the hot water or embarrassment, or both. "Just... not only guys."

"Oh," Ranma said, and shrugged. Then she thought for a bit more, and realized that Taizo, despite his best efforts, was still eyeing her breasts out of the corner of his eye. "Oh," she said again, and covered herself with her arms. "Sorry 'bout that. Taizo sighed.

"I wish I was like you," he said. "Just one way or the other. I don't even care which way anymore."

"I always heard it was a good thing," Ranma said, a little curious. "You know, whoever Mr. or Miss right is, you're fine."

"Yeah, that's nice in theory and all, but can you imagine being attracted to _everyone_ you meet?" Taizo asked, and shook his head. "It drives you nuts, even when you're careful. If' you're not careful..." Taizo trailed off. Ranma let the silence stretch as he collected his thoughts. "If you're not careful, you wake up in bed between your best friend and her boyfriend, not a month after..." He winced. "And then you just keep going—boy, girl, anything with legs, really, 'cuz you've got this gaping hole inside of you that you're trying to fill. No pun intended," Taizo amended after a moment, with a snort.

"You don't hafta tell me all this, you know," Ranma said softly.

"I told you I would if you agreed to train me," Taizo said. He tilted his head back, and stared up at the blue-tiled ceiling. "Besides, it's like you said. Small house. You would've found out sooner or later. It's not the whole story, anyway." Ranma stood up, grabbed a towel, and wrapped it around herself modestly.

"I'll go make dinner. Sit in here and soak for a while, so you don't get sore. I'll shout when it's time," she said, and padded towards the bathroom door.

"Hey," Taizo called from the basin. "Saw a picture of a cute girl in the living room. Was she the girl?" Ranma paused, then looked back over her shoulder.

"Maybe I'll tell you sometime," she answered after a bit. Taizo tried to conceal dis disappointment, but Ranma was paying attention this time. She sighed.

"My name's Ranma," she said. "It's only fair, after everything you told me."

"Ranma," Taizo repeated, trying the name out. His brow furrowed. "Wait, _the_ Ranma? Ranma Saotome?"

"The one and only," Ranma grinned.

"Kami, you're a legend!" He paused. "I thought you were a guy."

"Well, if you were some macho martial artist, how would you feel about a little gaijin-looking redhead with D-cups beating the stuffing outta you?" Ranma asked.

"Fair point," Taizo conceded. "You know that people are looking for you, don't you? People with big money."

"I didn't know, but I'd guessed. Any idea who?" Ranma asked.

"Well, I only know of a couple," Taizo said. "One's some businesswoman in Tokyo. Owns a restaurant chain. She says there's some kinda honor debt ."

"Long story," Ranma said. "She's probably right, though."

"Well, the second one I heard of is from... well, I guess, your father," Taizo shrugged. "Old guy, goes by the name Genma. Shows up at martial arts tournaments and offers to teach some secret techniques to anyone who can bring his kid back. I think I actually saw him at a tournament once, but we didn't talk." Ranma nodded.

"The last one..." Taizo trailed off. "It's kind of weird. Word's been running around for about a year now that some guy in China's willing to pay anyone their weight in solid gold if they can get you to the Bayankala region. Nobody knows who he is, or where he's from, though." Ranma's brow furrowed, and she looked at the floor for a bit as he did a bit of mental arithmetic.

"Fifteen years," she mumbled. "Guess it's about time Saffron grew back up." More loudly, she continued, "Thanks for that last one. He could be serious trouble." After a moment's thought, she added, "I'd really appreciate it if you didn't tell anyone I live up here, once we're done."

"Not a soul, unless you tell me otherwise," Taizo promised. "Guess I know why you don't tell strangers your name now." Ranma nodded, padded out of the bathroom, and slid the door shut behind her.

Taizo sat in the hot spring quietly for a few minutes, until he heard the sounds of cooking from the main room and could be sure that Ranma wasn't eavesdropping. With a visible shudder, Taizo started to cry, sobs of relief shaking his body even as he did his best to keep them quiet.

"Finally," he whispered after he cried himself out. "Nine years on the road, and I've finally found him." He scooped some water from the spring and splashed it over his face, the hot water turning his whole face as red as his cheeks had been, then rose from the waters and grabbed a towel.

- - - - -

It was well past midnight, the dim starlight, bright as it is only are in true country, cast everything in a dim palette of bluish grays. Ranma was woken by the sound of a creaking floorboard, and glanced to her left to see that Taizo's sleeping bag was empty and the door to her room open. For a moment, she was tempted to simply go back to sleep, but after a little more thought, she slipped into the umisenken, crept to the door, and peered out into the darkness.

Taizo stood across the room, his back to her, in front of the little picture of the lavender-haired girl. He rose a hand, clenched his index finger and thumb together, then flicked the thumb up, making a sound like faint sandpaper. A little flame appeared over his thumb, like a candle, and he held it near the framed photograph. He raised his other hand and made a fist, like he was about to attack the picture. Ranma tensed to spring, but after a moment, Taizo simply let the hand fall to his side.

"I can't really do anything to you through a picture, can I?" he asked softly; Ranma had to strain to hear him. After another moment, the little flame went out, and Ranma crept back to bed. She pretended to be asleep when Taizo snuck back into the room and eventually went to sleep himself. After about twenty minutes, she rolled over, and stared at her student.

"Who are you?" she whispered to herself. Taizo, snoring softly, didn't answer, and no other immediate answer presented itself. Ranma rolled onto her back and, after a while, fell asleep again.

--A/N--

Well, I wasn't exactly expecting to be writing 'fics again, much less so soon after reposting Genin. Truth be told, I've been needing a low-brain outlet for the stress of my college work, and the idea for this fic just got lodged in my head and wouldn't go away. I'll be continuing it as time and need allows.

I know Ranmafics are a bit old hat these days (I'm realizing, to my "horror," that there may be readers that weren't _alive_ when the series concluded), but this has always been my favorite fandom, both for the source material itself, and because the quality of the work that's typical for the fandom is much higher than is commonly seen elsewhere.

The general idea for this fic is pretty simple: the 'Ranma leaves the Nerima madness for some reason or another' trope is pretty well established and plumbed in fiction thusfar, as well as is another that's fueling this fic that you won't find out about for a while, but relatively few fics deal with more than the immediate aftermath of those decisions. Since it's about the fifteenth anniversary of the ending of the manga, I figured that I'd take that number as a jumping-off point and work my way to the story of what caused the mess I've chosen to create.

Reviews appreciated, but certainly not necessary.

Translations:

Waratteoni Endan- Laughing Demon Bullet

Houou Habatatta- The Phoenix Flaps His Wings

Kitei Toosenbou- Stand Your Ground

Akane- Scarlet (But you already knew that, since you're good Ranma ½ fans)


	2. Pickles

Disclaimer: I don't own any of this.

The Lady of the Mountain

by: Flashfyre5

Chapter 2: Pickles

Ranma was chewing thoughtfully on a strip of pickled daikon radish when Taizo stepped out of the bathroom. He had been living with Ranma for a week now, and was equal parts impressed and disappointed so far. Ranma had concocted an elaborate system of PVC piping that ran all the way to the clear, cool spring that fed the little river down below them. The gravity-fed system provided water for irrigation, the sink, and even a cold-water rinsing shower in the bathroom. Taizo had to admit that indoor, running water was an almost scandalous pleasure in a country farmhouse without electricity, even if the annual setup and teardown for the piping system nearest to the waterfall must have been hell.

On the other hand, Ranma hadn't proven to be a very good teacher. So far, they'd sparred every day in the mornings, before the sun managed to finally inch its way over the Daisetsu-san's peak, but those spars had been simple ones—no special techniques, no other training. Worse, Ranma was an impatient teacher. Though she fought at Taizo's speed for their spars, he would occasionally do either too well or make a boneheaded mistake, at which point Ranma's breathtaking speed would erupt and end the fight for the day. Afternoons consisted of the various chores that made farm life happen: maintainance on the little house and its piping system, planting a few small fields with the vegetables that Ranma liked that weren't rice, the careful circulation of water in the rice paddies, and so forth. While the work might have been strenuous for most, it was downright dull for Taizo.

Ranma pulled another spear of picked daikon from the mason jar in her hand and took a bite. She offered the jar to Taizo, who shook his head. He'd just brushed his teeth, and didn't feel like doing so again.

"Well, they're ready," she said, and screwed the top back onto the jar.

"What's the plan for the day, teach?" Taizo asked.

"Special techniques and a trip to town," Ranma answered, and took another bite of her pickle.

"Oh?" Taizo asked. He couldn't keep the hopeful tone out of his voice, and Ranma scowled at him.

"Shaddap. I need to know where you stand before I know what's best to teach you.," she said. "I've finally got a good idea on how your forms are, so it's time to see what else you can do. It's your own damn fault, y'know. You don't fight consistently."

"What do you mean?" Taizo asked.

"You're holding back on me," Ranma said, wagging the stub of per pickle at Taizo, who did his very best to not wince. "'S the only reason for someone to flop back and forth like you do. One set, you're smooth as silk, and the next you make some boneheaded mistake a black belt wouldn't make."

"I don't know what you mean, sensei," Taizo said, and tried to keep himself from wincing again, but failed. He hadn't addressed Ranma so formally since his first day.

"Sure you don't," Ranma deadpanned. "The more interesting question is why, anyway." Taizo didn't say anything. Ranma shook her head. "Well, at least you're as bad a liar as I am. Get ready. I'll meet you on the field."

- - - - -

The sky was bright and blue, and although it was about ten in the morning, the sun hid stubbornly behind Daisetsu-san, as it would each morning until winter came and angled the Earth a little differently. Ranma was crouched on the obsidian boulder when Taizo made his way onto their sparring field. Ranma waited for a minute, wondering if he'd try an explanation for his sparring, now that he'd had time to concoct an excuse, but none was forthcoming.

"All right, let's get started," Ranma said. Taizo assumed a horse stance, his legs wide and steady, fists at his waist. "Show me what you can do, then tell me about the school that came up with the moves."

"Okay," Taizo said. He breathed out, and the rock clamps that he'd used a week before grasped his feet and ankles. "Martial arts turf wars," he said. "It's a hard form that emphasizes personal defense and unbalancing or immobilizing your opponent." He made an open-palm strike, and the stone in front of him cracked and heaved upwards in a line about four centimeters wide. "It was invented in the late Tokugawa period by yakuza who needed a way to take and hold land when they weren't allowed to carry weapons openly. Where it's still practiced, it's by mostly the same sort of people, in areas where the cops keep a close lookout for guns and whatnot." Taizo clenched his fist, and the rock at the end of the line erupted into a foot-shaped clamp, much like the ones that held him in place.

"You learned a yakuza martial art?" Ranma asked skeptically.

"Kind of," Taizo admitted sheepishly, stepping out of his braces. "I learned it from a retired enforcer by the name of Toshi. No kids, but he wanted to pass the art on. I found him in the classifieds." Ranma nodded slowly. "He was dying of the big C, as he put it."

"I see," Ranma nodded. "Disadvantages of the form?"

"Its attack forms are pretty slow. Against most serious opponents, they're just too slow to be useful," Taizo explained. "The braces are the most useful move in the style for someone like me, because they let me take a hit without moving when I need to. It's a good form for taking down unskilled opponents without hurting them, though."

"Fair enough. What else?" Ranma asked.

"Martial arts cooking," Taizo said, and took a breath. He was about to exhale, but was startled by Ranma's laughter.

"Martial arts _cooking_?" she asked incredulously

"Hey, it's useful!" Taizo exclaimed, then chuckled a bit. "I actually thought the same thing when I first heard of it. It's kind of a hokey form when you practice it like you're supposed to—five five-minute combat rounds with an opponent, during each of which you have to prepare a dish for a fancy meal. Winner's determined half by normal combat rules and half by how good the food turns out."

"That's..." Ranma stretched the word out, "not _quite_ the stupidest martial art I've ever heard of, but it's close." Taizo sighed.

"That's kind of true," he admitted. "Anyway, the school I learned had some major influence from outside. Some gaijin from Hawaii came over during the War and fell madly in love with the last heir to the school. Turns out that when he wasn't a soldier, he was a firebreather, and the techniques got incorporated in."

"Ah," Ranma said. "The flamethrower." Taizo nodded, and inhaled again. This time, he blew a jet of flame ten meters long, and tracked it around the clearing before he ran out of breath. After inhaling again, he flicked his thumb against his forefinger, and a little candle-flame lit just above his thumb. This time, however, it spread down his hand and up his arm. Taizo did a short kata, his arm aflame, before he let the fire go out.

"To be honest, most of the useful forms from the school are from the firebreathing side," Taizo said, a bit sheepish. Ranma noticed that the hair had been singed off his forearm.

"Well, the first disadvantage seems to be that you're not fireproof," Ranma pointed out. Taizo looked at his arm, then shrugged.

"Yeah. They're all limited duration, and all the power moves rely on you staying put," Taizo said. "If you don't breathe properly, the flame'll backfire down your throat, and that can get bad. Running, even when you're really good, makes you puff."

"Fair enough. And your laughing demon bullet's pretty much the same as my mouko takabisha, I'm thinking," Ranma said. "Mind demonstrating it again?" Taizo shrugged, then fired an orb of crimson ki into the sky, where it sparked for a bit, then popped. "Hmm..." Ranma thought. "What're you powering it with? Anger?"

"Something like that," Taizo answered, and Ranma decided not to challenge him on it.

"It works pretty well, but you've gotta start using something positive," Ranma criticized. "The emotions you use grow on you, and the negative stuff can get outta control."

"The guy that taught me said so too, but I really don't have a positive emotion that makes more than a little puffball," Taizo agreed. "I mostly just don't use it unless I really have to."

"Well, starting right now, you're not using it at all," Ranma said, and hopped down from the boulder. "You said you're here lookin' for peace. Well, you're not gonna find any as long as you're firing those things off. The last guy I knew that could use that technique just about killed himself using a version of it based on depression." Taizo's eyebrows rose.

"Black hair, fangs, and a yellow bandanna?" he asked. Ranma nodded slowly. "That's the guy that taught it to me. I bumped into him heading for a monastery in Kansai. Went by the name-"

"Ryouga Hibiki," Ranma finished. She glanced around, then asked, "How long ago? That guy has a weird habit of showing up when you're not expecting him."

"Couple of years," Taizo shrugged. "He disappeared one night before we made it to the monastery. Left his backpack and everything. I waited a day or two for him to come back, but he never did." Ranma thought about this for a while. Taizo relaxed his stance while he waited, and watched the sun finally begin to crest Daisetsu-san.

"You got any other moves else I need to know about?" Ranma asked suddenly, startling him. Taizo shook his head.

"I don't think so," he said. Ranma motioned him to follow, and walked to the cliff at the edge of the field. Nearby, the spring cascaded into the long waterfall that fed Ranma's pipes.

"Hit me," she said when Taizo arrived. Taizo assumed a cautious stance, and Ranma grinned. "I won't dodge. Promise." Taizo jabbed at Ranma cautiously, and hit nothing. He paused for a moment; he hadn't seen Ranma dodge, but he'd been sure that he should have hit her right shoulder. He inched forward and punched solidly, holding his fist out at full extension. This time, there could be no mistake—his hand was sticking out of her solar plexus, but he'd felt nothing. He waved his hand around, but Ranma's form seemed to be without substance.

"This is the kazesenken," Ranma said to her astonished student, then hopped off of the cliff... and hung in the air, apparently unconcerned by the demands of gravity.

"How...?" Taizo managed. Ranma flitted lazily to her right, drifting towards the waterfall. Taizo was sure that he could see a rainbow passing _through_ her body.

"Everything exists partly in the spirit world and partly in the real world, right?" Ranma asked rhetorically. "It's why we have ki." Taizo nodded. "The principle behind the kazesenken is that the body and the spirit are linked, and if you pull..." Ranma paused, and grimaced. "There's really no word that describes the direction right. It's like... if you pull _out_ hard enough with your spirit, your body will follow." Ranma pivoted and floated back toward the cliff. She turned a slow, showy flip and landed without a sound on solid ground again.

"But how'd you fly?" Taizo wondered aloud. Ranma bopped him on the head.

"Dummy. I just told you," she said. "All but a tiny but of my body isn't in the real world, and the little bit that isn't is too light to be more affected by gravity than by the wind. Little puffs of ki are enough to take you wherever you want." Taizo nodded slowly. "Now, defend yourself," Ranma commanded, and Taizo took up a stance. Ranma punched, and Taizo moved to block it, but took the jab on his chest. He blinked in surprise.

"Again," Ranma said, and struck. Taizo blocked again, this time with both arms, but took another body blow. He watched Ranma's hand, which had passed through his blocking arms to strike him, slowly pull back. The inside of Ranma's wrist bumped against the inside of Taizo's arm, and Ranma winked, then pulled her hand through. Taizo thought for a moment, then dropped his stance.

"So, let me get this straight," he said, sitting down heavily. "This technique lets you avoid any strike, lets you penetrate any defense and escape any grapple, and you get to fly as a _side effect_?"

"Close, but not quite. Keep thinking," Ranma said, crouching next to him. Taizo obliged her. The sun was now almost half over Daisetsu-san, and it warmed the last of the morning chill from his skin. He watched the gooseflesh he hadn't noticed he had recede, then his head shot up, eyes wide.

"If your body is only ki in the spirit world, you can still be affected by ki attacks," he ventured hopefully.

"There we go," Ranma nodded, then stood. "It's a very powerful technique, and anyone that doesn't know at least one ki move won't be able to beat ya unless they cheat or you're stupid."

"And you're going to teach it to me?" Taizo asked, his incredulity showing on his face.

"Nope," Ranma said, and Taizo's hopes crashed to the ground along with his body. Oblivious, Ranma continued, "Well, it'd be better to say that I could teach it to you, but you can't learn it."

"Why not?" Taizo asked, pulling himself up.

"It's... kind of philosophical," Ranma explained. "If you went off and spent a few years in a monastery meditating on your navel, I could probably teach it to you, but you're just too _here_. It's hard to explain." Ranma thought for a few minutes.

"Okay," she finally said. "The basic idea is that everyone is partly in this world and partly in the spirit world, right?" Taizo nodded. "Well, we're all clustered around the middle, but everyone leans one way or another. I lean out—I've never really understood people very well, and always kinda found my own way, so it's much easier for me to lean out _more_. The hump in the middle is really hard, though. I can't lean _in_. You're on the other side, though. You're definitely in this world. You fight things that are here, and you care about things that're in front of you. If it's not _here_, it doesn't matter for ya unless it's supposed to be, right?" Taizo blinked, and turned over the thought in his head before responding.

"I...think I get what you mean," he said. "So, why're we here, then?"

"Because that's why I'm not going to teach you soft arts either," Ranma explained. "Your kinda fighting is perfect for who you are in here," Ranma poked Taizo's temple, "and trying to force soft forms in would only screw you up, so I'm gonna be a jerk sensei and teach you what you need to know, instead of what you want to know."

"O...kay..." Taizo said, and waited for her to continue.

"You can't learn the kazesenken," Ranma said," But you should be able to learn its sister form, where you lean _in_ to the world, and pull your spirit along with you." She began to walk back towards the trail down to her house; Ranma and Taizo's now-frequent passage to and from their sparring grounds had started to kill off the tender spring grass, and the beginnings of a genuine path were now visible to one who knew what to look for. Taizo followed her, thinking.

"Wait a second," he said. "You can't do this sister form, right?"

"Nope," Ranma said.

"Then how do you know it'll even work? Or even what it'll do if it does?" Taizo asked. Ranma shrugged.

"I know what it _should_ do, since it's basically the opposite in every way of the kazesenken," Ranma replied. "And if it doesn't, I'll just teach you something else." Taizo thought about this for a minute.

"So... how am I supposed to do it?" Taizo asked.

"I already told ya," Ranma said. "You have to lean _in_ to the world. Be more a part of it. I can't really explain it right, 'cuz words weren't supposed to deal with this kinda stuff. You're gonna have to figure it out some." Taizo groaned.

"You're evil," he grumbled. Ranma shrugged, and allowed herself a small grin at the expense of her student. Taizo was silent for a minute.

"It's not gonna let me fly, is it?" he asked. Ranma sighed.

"No, it won't."

- - - - -

Ranma and Taizo stood in front of the enormous pantry that huddled next to the little kitchen in Ranma's house. Inside, on the bottom, were two burlap bags of rice, one of which was open, a big plastic tub containing what looked like flour, an empty wood box, and a battered steel pressure cooker. Above that were several boxes of dry foods and non-refrigerated liquids—a few packets of instant ramen, a big jug of sesame oil, some soy sauce and such. Above that was a shelf of canned goods, mostly empty. The top half of the pantry, however, was dominated by shelves and shelves of jarred vegetables, organized by type and size: pickled daikon, beet, cucumber, carrot—it seemed to Taizo as if Ranma pickled just about everything that she grew on her farm.

"Here's the deal," Ranma explained. "We're gonna take about half of all this down to town and sell it to the locals. They know I'm coming, 'cuz I do this every year around this time. Usually takes a day to get through the whole place, but with you here, we should be able to finish in a half day."

"That's a lot of pickles," Taizo said.

"Yep," Ranma agreed. "And they're gonna keep us in the sorta food I can't grow 'till next year."

"Really?" Taizo asked.

"Three hundred yen for the little jars, six hundred for the medium ones, and a thousand for the biggies," Ranma explained. "It adds up fast, especially since I'll go down in about a month and buy most of the jars back for pocket change." Taizo looked again at the pantry and tried to do a quick count of the big jars that Ranma had sectioned off for sale, but stopped after he reached fifty and was nowhere near all of them. Instead, he whistled, impressed.

"Those are some expensive pickles," he said.

"I make damn good pickles," Ranma countered. "The rest of my food aint special, but I don't sell it to make a living."

"That's probably a good thing," Taizo muttered, and received a sharp elbow to his stomach for the comment.

"Shut up and go empty out your traveling pack. It'll make moving this mess easier." Taizo left for the bedroom. Ranma watched him go, a rather nasty grin settling on her face.

"And we'll see what you keep in there later," she said to herself, and began to pack her own travel pack.

- - - - -

Biei town was a good four kilometers' or so trek through the forested mountains, followed by fifteen in the small, old, yellowing tourist bus on which Ranma had bartered passage in exchange for a medium jar of pickled beets and which ran between the town and the Shirogane onsen and golf course. The onsen had seen better days, but poor old Mita-san, who drove the bus, was not as young as he had once been, and neither was his wife, who accepted the pickles and ran the front office. Taizo learned that they had one child, a young woman, who was away at college in Sapporo. Ranma chatted cheerfully with Mita-san as the little bus bumped and shimmied into town, and gave him a small jar of pickled daikon when the three of them arrived in town. Mita-san parked the bus, locked it, and headed for the town's tiny movie theater.

"Remember the prices?" Ranma asked.

"Three hundred, six hundred, and a thousand," Taizo rehearsed. Ranma nodded.

"All right. You take the northeast side, I'll take the southwest side, and we meet here at six. Just go door-to-door and tell 'em you've got pickles. Any questions?" Ranma asked. When Taizo shook his head, she tightened the straps on her backpack, and walked off to the south.

Taizo found that it took almost no effort to actually _sell_ the pickles, though everyone he met expected a short, red-haired woman to do the actual selling. After explaining that yes, she was just fine, no, he wasn't her boyfriend/husband/brother, and that yes, these were really her pickles for what seemed the thirtieth time, Taizo found himself at an unusually large convenience store. After selling a big jar of pickled cucumber and a small one of pickled beets to the clerk, who thought for sure that he must be the red-haired woman's boyfriend, Taizo looked around the store.

He thought for a while, then used a little of the money that he'd made from selling pickles to buy a few items from the stationary section, and a couple others from the shop's tiny hardware section. It wasn't much, and he'd left his wallet at Ranma's house, with all of his other traveling gear. Taizo made a note on the back of his hand of the amount of his purchases, so that he could pay Ranma back an appropriate amount, then set to work on them. After a couple of minutes, he showed it to the clerk.

"Think it'll work?" he asked. The clerk laughed.

- - - - -

Hayashi Minami was an admittedly eccentric person. At sixty-three, she had, in fact, made a living at it; when she had been a young girl, and had had herself a torrid love affair, as should any young woman. When it ended in heartbreak, she had decided that she'd had enough of that nonsense, thank you very much, and had sworn off men. She'd embraced gaijin hippie-ism, had grown her hair long, gone by the name 'Flower Child' for a few months, and had taken an interest in fortune-telling. All of this (except for the fortune-telling) had lasted precisely four and a half months, at which point she'd met the man she would marry, but, as a potter, had precisely zero marketable job skills. For the first two months of their marriage, she thought it was terribly romantic, until their dowry ran out and, with it, their pantry.

So, since her husband wouldn't give up his pots, which were beautiful but didn't bring in much money, she'd set the front of their tiny house (inherited from her husband's family) up as a fortune-telling parlor, and had found to her enormous surprise that she was quite good at it. She hadn't the faintest idea why her predictions came true so frequently (even when she got silly and made _specific_ predictions, which her how-to handbook had specifically forbidden), but quickly gained an excellent reputation. After a little thought, she'd shrugged, raised her rates, and had supported her artist husband for the last forty years.

As such, it's somewhat impressive that she was thoroughly surprised when she answered her front door to see a tallish, brown-haired man wearing denim jeans, a black shirt, an enormous camping backpack, and a makeshift sign, made with a yellow legal pad, a marker, some twine and some tape, that read as follows:

My name is Taizo, and I am helping the red-haired woman that usually sells you pickles this year. She is not hurt or sick, she has not run off to China, America, or Tasmania, and she would probably like me to say 'hi' for her. So 'hi.' If you really want to see her, she's on the south side of town. I am not her boyfriend, or husband, or brother, and I am not trying to be any of these things. I'm just help.

The pickles are 300 yen for a small jar, 600 yen for a medium jar, and 1000 yen for a big jar.

Minami read Taizo's sign carefully, then read it again, to be sure that she'd read it correctly the first time.

"It looks like you've had a long day," she said. Taizo sighed, and Minami laughed. "Why don't you come in, son. I'll make you some tea and buy some of your friend's pickles."

"Thank you," Taizo said, and entered the house. The door shut behind him, and Taizo found himself in an oddly-decorated room; semitransparent purple curtains cast the room in strange shades of violet, crimson, and lavender. Shinto-style paper blessings hung from the ceiling alongside blown-glass fairies and dreamcatchers. Taizo set his pack down carefully; it was mostly empty now, but was still plenty heavy enough to crush anything fragile. Minami returned from her kitchen with a little tray, containing two steaming cups of green tea, a few packaged cookies, and a pair of napkins. She sat at the only table in the room, which was round and had a glass ball in its center. Taizo joined her.

"Nice place," he muttered, still looking around the room.

"I'm a fortune teller," Minami explained. "Didn't you see the sign?" Taizo shook his head. Minami sipped at her tea, and Taizo took his. A tentative sip revealed that it was excellently made, and a very fancy blend at that.

"Thank you..." he trailed off.

"Minami," she said, and smiled. "So, why are you helping our gaijin pickle-maker this year?" she asked.

"Actually, she's a martial artist," Taizo explained. "I'm training with her, and she didn't want to be stuck in town all day by herself."

"That's very nice of you," Minami smiled. She took a cookie, and bit a piece off of it. "But it's not the whole truth, is it?" Taizo cocked his head a bit to the side.

"I'm... not sure what you mean," he said.

"Just what I said," Minami said. "You're not just here to train with your martial artist friend. I can see it in your eyes. You're chasing something. A dream, maybe, or lost love." Taizo fidgeted a bit, and put his tea down. "I'm sorry if I've made you uncomfortable."

"No, it's all right," Taizo said after a moment. "You're a fortune-teller. That sort of thing is what you do for a living."

"That it is," Minami nodded. She took another bite of her cookie. "I am correct, though, aren't I?" Taizo said nothing for a minute, then nodded minutely. "Which are you chasing? A dream, or lost love, or something else?"

"I don't know," Taizo answered in a whisper, and looked down. "I'm looking for peace, for sure. Maybe a dream. Maybe even lost love, but I doubt it."

"Let me see your hands," Minami said, holding out her own. They were just beginning to show the signs of age; no wrinkles, quite yet, but a sharp observer would be able to see the faintest of age spots.

"I don't have any money," Taizo said, shaking his head.

"This one's on the house," Minami smiled. "Your friend never lets me tell her fortune. I think it's because she's heard I'm quite good at it." Taizo hesitated, then rested his calloused hands in her soft ones. "Let's see," Minami said, scrutinizing them. "What would you like to know?"

"Will I find peace?" Taizo asked.

"No," Minami said, then frowned. "That's very unusual. It seems that peace is not in your destiny... or rather, either of your destinies. You're a very strange young man, aren't you?" Taizo chuckled.

"You don't know that half of it," he said. "Either of my destinies?" he asked.

"In one destiny, you fight the world endlessly, facing and defeating, and being defeated by impossible odds of your own choosing," Minami said, her thumb tracing a ragged fold near Taizo's thumb. It had been sliced open by a knife there, years ago, in training for martial arts cooking. "In the other," she continued, tracing a nearby fold, this one much smoother, "you surrender to the world, and wander it for much of your life. You'll become a great legend, but not the one you want to me." Minami blinked, then pulled a face. "I'm sorry I don't have better news for you. Your lines are in all the wrong places."

"That's all right," Taizo sighed. "Are you sure those are the possibilities that are in front of me, instead of behind me? I've been wandering for the last nine years, and as a martial artist, I fight sometimes."

"Quite certain," Minami said. "You'll have to make a choice soon—very soon—that will set your destiny."

"Is there any good news?" Taizo asked. Minami nodded.

"You can have happiness, if you make the right choice. Perhaps even great happiness," Minami said, and smiled some. She looked up, at Taizo. "Ask me the question you really want to ask." Taizo hesitated, not sure if he dared. When he spoke, it felt like his heart had leapt up his throat and was threatening to strangle him.

"Lost love?" he managed.

"In one of your destinies," Minami said, and when she spoke, it seemed to Taizo like the sound of her voice was the only sound in the universe, "you may yet have your heart returned to you."

"Which one?" Taizo asked.

"I can't say," Minami replied. "All I can say is that the right choice will be the wrong choice."

"The right choice..." Taizo repeated, then blinked. "What the heck does that mean?" Minami shrugged.

"I don't know. I just read the palms. They don't usually make any sense to me," Minami said. "You're a smart boy. You'll figure it out. Now, let's buy some pickles!" Taizo wasn't sure what to say, so he said nothing.

- - - - -

Ranma fell out of the kazesenken and took a few minutes to breathe before she entered her house. She'd rushed through her annual sales and had left a note at Mita-san's bus that she'd find her own way home, and to wait for Taizo. The kazesenken made for quick travel, but even zipping along at nearly thirty kilometers per hour was less than half of what Mita-san would manage with his bus once Taizo finished. As soon as she could, Ranma entered her house, tossed her now-empty backpack on top of her table, and entered the bedroom. As she'd hoped, Taizo had left his things piled hastily in the corner of the room. She knelt, and began to sift through what was there.

It was, she realized quickly, fairly unremarkable. Most of the bulk was clothing. She examined each piece, hoping for a logo or location decal on a shirt—he'd mentioned college in passing before—but had no luck. The remains were fairly predictable: a fresh box of waterproof matches, a tiny camp stove, the propane cylinder that would fuel it, a few of heavy-duty camping water bottles, one empty, his bedroll (which, to her disappointment, revealed no hidden treasures when it was unrolled and turned inside-out), a cheap plastic poncho, a few pair of chopsticks, a light skillet, a small pot, and an old-fashioned pup tent (which produced nothing when unrolled either, aside from some rope and tent stakes). Ranma shifted the remaining detritus around, thinking. An old spoon, some socks (with nothing secreted away inside), his shaving kit, a little black leather wallet, some floss...

Wait a second. She glanced back. A _wallet_. Ranma snatched it up and flipped it open, then sighed in disappointment. The wallet was little more than a billfold. There was room inside for credit cards, identification, and so forth, but the little pockets were all disappointingly empty.

"You're sure hiding yourself pretty well for someone who just wants to learn some martial arts," she muttered to herself. No I.D. At all? Unlikely. You needed that sort of thing to pick up most day labor, the back-pocket emergency funding plan that any wandering martial artist had to rely on from time to time. Out of curiosity, more than anything else, Ranma opened the billfold section of the wallet, and was surprised at how high some of the denominations were. Definitely out of the ordinary for a wandering martial artist. She pulled the wad of cash out to count it, and something small and white fell out and fluttered lightly to the floor. Ranma picked it up, and her eyes narrowed. A quick search of Taizo's cash revealed its mate.

"Gotcha, you sonouvabitch," she said with heartfelt satisfaction. She replaced Taizo's cash, and as she started to pile his things back up, Ranma heard her front door creak open. She stood and stalked out to the main room.

"I'm back, Teach," Taizo said as Ranma entered the room. His backpack was half off, and he looked as tired as Ranma felt.

"You fucking _liar_!" Ranma spat, and her fist slammed, hard, into his cheek.

"What?" Taizo staggered back. Ranma pressed forward, and a kick to his gut sent Taizo tumbling out the still-open front door. Outside, the sun had just set to the east, and while it wasn't true night yet, it would be shortly.

"Was _anything_ you told me true?" Ranma shouted. "One word since ya got here?"

"I don't know what you're talking about!" Taizo protested, assuming a defensive stance.

"Then explain this, jackass!" Ranma demanded, and held out the two little photographs that she'd found in Taizo's wallet. One was a headshot of her, in profile, but much younger—perhaps seventeen, but certainly no more. It had been the first of the two that Ranma had found, and she had trouble remembering herself as ever being that young. The other, far more damning, was a photograph of herself in male form, grinning at the camera and tossing the obnoxious 'v' hand sign that had been so popular in her youth.

"You're one of the Nerima crew!" she accused. "Nobody else had pictures of me back then." Taizo couldn't hide his grimace, even in the dim twilight. "Now, answer my damn question!"

"Everything except my name was the truth," Taizo admitted, and dropped his stance.

"But you were one of the Nerima crew?" Ranma asked.

"Yes," Taizo said. Ranma snarled and threw the photos at him. They didn't make it, and the now-slightly crumpled bits of paper fluttered to the ground midway between the two.

"I'm living up here as a _woman_!" Ranma shouted. "Whoever the hell you are, you know me! I sure as hell wouldn't be doing this is I thought I stood a half a chance of staying hidden as a guy. I've been doing this fifteen goddamn years, and I still dream about being a guy again!"

"I'm sorry," Taizo attempted.

"Sorry doesn't even begin to cut it, you bastard," Ranma snarled.

"What would you have done if you'd know who I was?" Taizo pleaded desperately. "No matter who I was, you would've thrown me off your mountain or run away. Probably both." His voice dropped back to a more normal level. "I told you the truth earlier, Ranma. I've been looking for you for nine years, and what I'm really after is peace." He paused, then spoke again, his voice a little shaky, "Please..." Ranma didn't say anything for a minute that seemed to stretch forever. Her anger was palpable, almost a physical thing of itself, but she found herself choking it back for the moment.

"Everything else you've told me since you got here is true?" Ranma asked. Her voice was normal, but her fury was still undisguised. Taizo didn't answer right away; but seemed to think for a while before answering.

"Yes. I think so," he amended. Ranma glared at him.

"I catch you lying one time and you're gone. I find out that one thing you told me since you got here is a lie and you're gone," Ranma said. "I got no time for honorless assholes, and I can't think of a single person from Nerima who don't fit that category."

"So... you'll still teach me?" Taizo asked.

"I made you a promise," Ranma said. "And Ranma Saotome keeps his word. Even when he's been a she for a long time." Taizo breathed a sigh of relief, but it was short-lived.

"Now tell me your real name," Ranma demanded. Taizo didn't answer right away.

"Tell me why you keep a picture of Shampoo in your living room first," Taizo countered, but couldn't keep his apprehension out of his voice. He held Ranma's gaze, though, and the two stared at each other for a time as twilight finally turned into night. The moon hung low in the sky, the top sliver of its white bulk just barely visible over Daisetsu-san. It cast the dim outdoors in a strange, ghostly half-light.

"I'll make you a deal," Ranma finally said. "If you can figure out the first part of the kazesenken's sister technique by midnight tomorrow, I'll answer your question. If you can't, you'll answer mine." She paused. "Deal?"

"Deal," Taizo agreed, not daring to challenge Ranma further. She turned and reentered her house, and soon the little building was lit from within by a kerosine-fueled lantern. Taizo took a couple of steps to follow her, but stopped, knelt, and recovered the little photographs. He looked at the pictures and smoothed the thick paper out carefully, trying to erase the wrinkles that now marred them. After a few minutes, spent more in his memories than in contemplation of the pictures, Taizo stood and entered the house.

--A/N--

Hmm... this has been coming a bit more easily than I'd thought it might. Whether that's a good thing or not is up to you, I suppose; it's been useful to me, as a tool for seeding myself for the writing I actually _need_ to do (college and all that—12-15 pages, tomorrow, and much more to follow). In that regard, I suppose that this fic is accomplishing that which I actually need it to accomplish. If you all (or, indeed, any of you) enjoy it too, then that's a wonderful bonus.

So, Ranma's been living as a woman voluntarily, and not because (s)he actually wants to. Taizo's been outed as a member of the Nerima Wrecking Crew. Some pickles have been sold. Let it never be said that I draw things out longer than they need to be; after all, Ranma's the sort of person that picks away at a mystery pretty relentlessly until (s)he figures out what's up, and a mystery is exactly what (s)he had on his/her hands after that first night.

A few of you have guessed at Taizo's identity. As you might have guessed, I dropped a couple of clues in this chapter, so if you figure it out early, congratulations to you. Taizo's not supposed to be a terribly hard nut to crack, from our perspective; circumstances you don't yet know about are complicating things, though. We'll see if any of you figure out what's going on with the photo that Taizo's so fixated on, though. (Hey, a guy can keep a little mystery to himself! ^_~)

For those of you that are wondering, I do in fact have a specific location where I've set this story. If you're interested in having a look for yourself, bring up Google Maps, call up Shirogane Onsen, Hokkaido, and look about four or five kilometers east northeast. There'll be a terrace on the side of Mt. Daisatsu, just past Mt. Maru, near a lake in a valley. That's where I've chosen to put Ranma's farm. The house and farm is on the lower end of the slope, and the training grounds are higher, near the lake.

Translations:  
Daisetsu-San- Mt. Daisetsu, or Big Snow Mountain (lit. trans.)

Kazesenken- Fist of a Thousand Winds


	3. Two Impossible Things Before Midnight

Disclaimer: I don't own any of this.

The Lady of the Mountain

by: Flashfyre5

Chapter 3: Two Impossible Things Before Midnight

The morning sun had not yet even begun to rise, regardless of Daisetsu-san's bulk, as Taizo left Ranma's house the next morning. Dew made the soft, young grasses cold, and if he breathed hard, with his mouth wide, Taizo could make a puff of steam with his breath. The night's chill would burn off quickly as the day came, and even moreso when the sun crested Daisetsu-san, but that would not be for several more hours. He hadn't gotten much sleep the night before.

"Damn," Taizo said softly, then blew a breath out. After a minute's further contemplation, he turned and re-entered the house. A little poking around in the pantry revealed that the second bag of what he'd thought to be rice were, in fact, potatoes. The beginnings of an idea forming, he walked over to the kitchen, knelt, and opened a cupboard. Inside was an icebox, which he wrestled out as quietly as he could. Eggs, bell peppers, a leek... He thought a bit. He was pretty good at gaijin food.

A few potatoes were retrieved and washed, and the leek and a pair of bell peppers followed them onto Ranma's big bamboo cutting board. Taizo spun a potato on his index finger, and as it rotated, used a little knife of ki to peel most of the skin off. He did the same with the other three, then diced all four into chunks. He looked around for a pot, then remembered Ranma's big pressure cooker. He retrieved it from the pantry and grimaced at its condition; Ranma had probably only ever used it to can her pickles. It would have to be cleaned. Still, a pressure cooker was handy for this dish. Taizo was still scrubbing the lid when Ranma stepped into the main room.

"You're up early," Ranma yawned, then leaned back to crack her spine. Taizo glanced over and immediately wished he hadn't; the stretch emphasized Ranma's bust in a very distracting way.

"I couldn't really sleep," he admitted.

"Nervous?" Ranma asked. Taizo nodded, and finished scrubbing the lid of the pressure cooker. The silence stretched for a bit, until Taizo dumped the chopped potatoes into the pressure cooker. "Watcha makin'?" Ranma finally asked.

"A Denver bake," Taizo said, mangling the name. "It's a gaijin breakfast recipe I learned when I was doing martial arts cooking. You're supposed to cook it in a heavy sort of cast iron pot, but the pressure cooker'll be fine." He started to chop up and de-seed the bell peppers. There was silence again, for a time.

"So, how'd you figure out that the Jusenkyo guide was lying?" Ranma asked. Taizo stopped, then turned to face Ranma. "Or did he bother keepin' his word?" Ranma amended.

"The guide told us all that you'd cured yourself when we got to Jusenkyo. He said you went south afterward, and that you hadn't talked to him, except to ask where the nannichuan was. We all believed him, too," Taizo said. He leaned back against the counter and glared at Ranma. "Hell, I figured that that was just one more thing you hated that you'd finally been able to get rid of, like the rest of us." At this, Ranma returned her glare, and Taizo finally faltered. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that," he admitted, and turned back to the remaining pepper. Ranma sighed, and her face softened.

"No, I probably deserved it," she said. "So you're one of the girls?" Taizo laughed.

"Of course I'm one of the girls, you idiot," Taizo shook his head. "Who else would've chased you down after fifteen years? With pictures, no less." The chopped peppers went into the pot, and Taizo began to dismember the leek. "My turn for a question," he said. "How'd you get Herb to back you up?"

"Well, gettin' him to lock me as a girl wasn't exactly tough, except for the fact that I had to put up with him being an asshole about me askin'," Ranma said. "He started to understand when I told him about what was goin' on in Nerima, though." Taizo froze for a minute, then continued to work on his leek. If Ranma noticed, she didn't comment. "Gettin' him to promise not to let anyone else use the chiisuiton was the tough part. Anyone ever tell you what happened on Horai-san?"

"I got the short version," Taizo said, and the leek found its way into the pot. "You and Herb fought. Everyone got unlocked, then you beat Herb and the mountain collapsed." Ranma grunted, then nodded her head.

"The part I left out when I told everyone is that I saved Herb's ass from getting crushed when the mountain collapsed," Ranma explained. "Guys like him don't like owing life debts." Four eggs were cracked open, and dropped into the pot.

"Jeez, Ranma. Taking a cue from Nabiki?" Taizo snorted. He put a little water into the pot, then took a pair of cooking chopsticks and stirred the contents vigorously.

"I wanted to disappear in a way that meant none o' you'd ever find me," Ranma said. "My turn. How'd you get Herb to break his word?"

"Was that why you made me get into the bath when I got here?" Taizo asked.

"Can't blame a guy for bein' careful," Ranma shrugged. "To be fair, the other part of it was the rice planting." Taizo tossed his chopsticks into the sink, then latched the lid onto Ranma's pressure cooker.

"Herb's going soft in his old age," Taizo said, grinning ruefully. "It only took him about a year to realize that I wasn't going to leave until he used the chiisuiton on me." Taizo paused, then shook his head. "He told me to tell you to leave him the hell out of your escape plans next time. He was smiling when he said it, though, so I'm not sure whether he was serious or not."

"You and me both," Ranma admitted, then cocked her head to one side. "Herb didn't just kill you for bugging him? Taizo played with the sealed pressure cooker for a minute before he answered.

"Well, you're the one who accused me of holding back," he grinned, a little sheepishly. "Part of it's me not being used to this body, but..." he trailed off.

"Who've _you_ been training with?" Ranma asked, her eyebrows raised. Taizo grinned confidently.

"I'll tell you some time," he said, and quickly left the house, taking the pressure cooker with him. Ranma stood still in thought for a bit, then walked over to his little wall-mounted picture frame. She glanced around to be sure that Taizo hadn't reentered the house, then took the picture off of the wall and turned it over. On the back side, where a bit of cardboard would normally hold the picture in place on the little frame, was instead another pane of glass, and another, much older picture. Ranma stared at the photograph for several minutes, lost in deep thought. The deep hiss of Taizo's flamethrower broke her reverie, and she glanced out the nearest window. Taizo had set the pressure cooker onto a pair of old cinderblocks, and was immolating the underside. He paused, took a fresh breath, and exhaled again onto the slightly reddish bottom of the pot.

"Not a chance in hell," Ranma said, and replaced the frame, the hidden photograph safely camouflaged against the wall of her home once again. Taizo breathed on the pot a third time, and when he was done, the bottom of the pressure cooker was a dull, angry orange. Even from inside the house, Ranma could hear the sound of sizzling food cooking inside. Taizo sat down on a third cinderblock, which he'd turned lengthwise, and relaxed for a bit while breakfast cooked. Ranma stepped outside to join him.

"I like pressure cookers," Taizo said, watching the bottom of the pot as it lost its glow. "They make slow-cooking food zip right through to done before the delicate stuff gets totally destroyed. You can't really do that with anything else." Ranma grunted, and Taizo glanced up at her.

"Pressure cooker," Ranma thought aloud. She nodded after a moment's contemplation. "Okay, how's this for pressure cooker. You're off the hook for sparrin' and chores today so you can work on your technique. Gimme a shout when you think you've got it and I'll test ya. Get it wrong and you'll regret it."

"Oh, yeah?" Taizo asked.

"Yeah," Ranma said. "If it works like it should, leaning into the world oughta make you immovable. That's easy to test." Taizo grimaced.

"Why, when you say that, do I suddenly expect horrific pain?" he asked. Ranma grinned. The pot ticked and popped as the metal on its bottom cooled to more normal temperatures, shrinking slightly. "You know," Taizo said thoughtfully, "we really should name this technique, for clarity's sake."

"Can't," Ranma said firmly. "Naming rights go to the first person to master the form. Nobody's mastered it yet, so no name." Taizo stood, planted a foot on the top of Ranma's pressure cooker, and hit the pressure release valve. Steam shot out of the pot in a meter-long spout with a keening whistle; the pot would surely have gone rocketing off into the fields had Taizo not held it in place.

"That's fine for you, but it's damn inconvenient for me," Taizo grumbled, and picked the pot up by a handle.

"Then earn the right to name it," Ranma taunted.

"Fine! I will!" Taizo declared, and swept back into the house. Ranma hesitated before re-entering.

"He can make a ki knife and put up with the heat from a pot that was glowing hot a coupla minutes ago?" Ranma mused to herself. "Herb did more than lock his curse." She thought for a minute more. "Either he's goin' outta his way to tell me something, or he's thick as a brick." Something about that thought tugged at Ranma's memory, but she couldn't retrieve whatever it was connected to.

"If you don't get in here and eat your share, I'll eat it for you," Taizo shouted from inside. While many things about Ranma had changed in the past fifteen years, some did not. She was seated at her kitchen table within seconds of Taizo's call.

- - - - -

Taizo stood on Ranma's training ground, alone. He glanced around, hoping for inspiration of some kind, then sat down into a lotus position.

"What the hell does he mean by 'lean in to the world?'" Taizo wondered aloud, not noticing his Freudian slip. A bird landed in front of him, small and pale gray, almost the same color as the rock it sat on. Taizo leaned forward. "I don't suppose you could tell me, birdie?" It chirped. Taizo laughed. "It's too bad I don't speak bird. You probably just told me the secret to inner peace." The bird chirped again twice, preened its tail, then flew away. Taizo focused and began to meditate, falling into himself as Shodai-sensei had taught him, years ago, at his little Shaolin temple in Kumamoto.

Time passed.

Taizo was never sure how much time it would take him to find his center when he meditated. Sometimes, it would take hours for him to chase down the evasive little kernel of emotion and identity that his whole being revolved around. Other times, the repulsive, squirming, little purple node—no matter how many times Shodai-sensei had told him not to imagine it with a physical form, Taizo had never been able to successfully meditate without conjuring a mental image to represent it—seemed to seek him out.

He had asked Shodai-sensei about its appearance once, and the big, bald, middle-aged pacifist had replied (with more than a little concern in his voice) that it probably looked the way that Taizo _thought_ it should look. Such a thing could only reflect what the meditator brought to himself—it was, at heart, a reflection of how Taizo saw himself.

Taizo had never talked about it again, but knew that Shodai-sensei was right; he could see in the little kernel all the hope, determination, anger and, most of all, the shame at what and who he was that sometimes overwhelmed by in the dark corners of the night. With the shame came the pangs of a shattered heart, a gaping hole in his chest that never closed. And behind that, hidden in a corner of his soul, the faint voice of something else, something nearly drowned out by all the rest: guilt. The tiny spark of self-knowledge that told him, no matter how hard he tried to deny it, that all this was at least partially his fault.

Taizo re-opened his eyes, feeling the swirling, detached unease that he always found in meditation. The sun hadn't crested Shodai-san yet. That was good; he had only spent perhaps an hour finding his center. He breathed carefully, maintaining his meditation. Leaning _in_... he thought for a time, in the slow, detached way that he thought when meditating. Eventually, he began to physically lean forward very slowly, and as he did so, attempted to mentally push his center out of himself, or at least as far forward as he could. For a moment, he felt like he had almost touched something, but then his center rebounded off of the edge of his being, and the meditative state shattered.

"Damn it," he muttered, and began again. Taizo found his center more quickly this time. Once he had, Taizo leaned forward again, but this time tried to push his whole self out, soul and all. It became slow work; his spirit had no interest in leaving his body, and as it did, Taizo was left feeling numb and almost-dead, almost as if his whole body had gone to sleep. After another hour of careful distancing, Taizo could picture in his mind's eye his soul, the little purple center squirming wildly within it, floating about a half-meter away from his body, connected to him only by a gossamer thread.

"Ranma," he called, careful to preserve his meditation. "I think I might have something." For a minute, Taizo heard nothing, and began to suspect that Ranma hadn't heard anything. Just as he was about to call again, he heard the rapid approach of footsteps from behind. Before Taizo could react, Ranma swung a broad shovel into his back with as much force as she could muster. The momentum of her attack sent Taizo flying a good twenty meters through the air before he crashed down into the boughs of a cedar tree.

"Nope!" Ranma announced with an almost sadistic glee, then returned to the farm.

- - - - -

After taking a half hour to think things through, Taizo could see the inherent flaw in his previous strategy: he'd imagined he was pushing himself out into the world, but he'd forgotten the obvious fact that the world was all around him. If he pushed his spirit one way into the world, it would by necessity move away from another part.

This time, as Taizo meditated, he tried to expand himself, to grow his sense of being from the inside. For some time, nothing happened, but Taizo was nothing if not stubborn. Slowly, he began to feel things beyond himself: the way the winds were moving above his head, the shifting of little grains of sand across the stone around him. He even found his little avian friend, who had perched atop the obsidian boulder. He lingered on it for a moment, and the bird chirped at him, then took off. Taizo grew himself as much as he could, expanding his spirit by slow centimeters. After about an hour's work, he felt warm and distant, but uneasy. The little kernel of his center had grown with his outer spirit, which exposed some aspects of himself that Taizo didn't like very much.

Taizo spent a few minutes thinking. He was pretty sure that this, whatever it _was_, wasn't what he was looking for. He felt things in the world that he didn't normally—feeling the little bird had been strange and unique, and something he very much would like to try again some other time—but he was beginning to suspect that meditation was not the key. Meditation turned one inward, and even when he used it to look outside of himself, he was still necessarily retreating from the world into his own mind to do it.

On the other hand, he'd spent an hour getting to this point. He had to be sure.

"Ranma-" he began, but didn't get a chance to finish. Ranma appeared out of the umisenken immediately and grabbed him from behind. With a heave, she tipped over backwards, pulling Taizo with her in a textbook-perfect German suplex. Taizo's head cratered the stone a little as he impacted it.

"Nope!" she crowed, and vanished again before Taizo could retaliate.

- - - - -

It was almost noon, but Taizo decided that his lunch could wait. He was certain now that meditation had been a mistake, and that his answer did not lie that way. He thought for a few minutes about Ranma's vague instructions, which were proving to be worse than useless, before shaking his head in frustration. At a loss for other ideas, he instead considered Ranma's kazesenken. It was light, airy, distant, floating. Taizo lay back on the ground and stared out at the blue sky. He tilted his head. _Out_. He rolled over, and looked down at the ground. _In_. The world was round, after all, so down, from any point on it, would also be in. This technique was supposed to make him immovable, right?

Taizo stood and assumed a horse stance. It was, for most, hard to hold, but exceptionally steady. To graduate from Shodai-sensei's monastery, however, Taizo had had to hold the stance for a full day, from dawn until dusk, while holding fifty kilos worth of stone, and had since become something of a familiar central point for Taizo.

He breathed. In. With his ki, and pulling as much of his spirit along with as he could, he pushed down. The going, this time, was much easier; Taizo could imagine, with some practice, using this in combat. He pushed down harder, with all his might; sweat beaded its way down his quickly-reddening face, and was rewarded, after only a few minutes' work, when his feet sunk a few millimeters into the solid rock of the sparring grounds. His legs were screaming in protest at the force they were bearing, but Taizo could not, for the life of him, move either leg.

"Ranma!" he shouted, and his feet sunk another millimeter. "Ranma, I've got it!" After a minute—less than he'd expected—Ranma charged up off of the path down to the farm. She was carrying something that Taizo couldn't clearly make out, but dropped it as she advanced. He grinned, ready to receive her test. Ranma leapt, and her right leg arced out into a flying kick. Her foot slammed into Taizo's chest, and while he rocked back just a bit, the force of her attack did not move him a micrometer from his position. Ranma landed lightly and examined him for brief moment.

"Ha! Got it before lunch!" Taizo grinned, but Ranma shook her head.

"Nah, I don't think so," she said, and rushed forward again. This time, she leapt upwards, off of one of Taizo's legs, and arced high into the sky. She flipped, almost lazily, then came crashing down with a terrible inevitability. She landed with both feet on Taizo's shoulders, and the force of her impact rammed Taizo's legs up to his knees into the hard rock beneath him. He thrashed a bit, now trapped in his martial stance, as Ranma dismounted him.

"I can see how you got there, though," she said as she walked over to the boxy item she'd dropped on her approach. "Down is in, right?" Taizo nodded. "That's not what I meant." She bent and unwrapped what Taizo could now see was a patterned cloth—its blue and white geometric pattern had thrown Taizo off as she'd approached. Inside were two bento boxes, which Ranma retrieved, and walked back over to her trapped companion.

"You do know that that whole 'lean in' thing is worse than useless, don't you?" Taizo snapped. Ranma stopped just out of Taizo's reach and arched an eyebrow.

"Do you want lunch or not?" she asked. Taizo did his best not to grind his teeth.

"Sorry, Teach," he mumbled. Ranma handed him a bento box, then climbed back onto Taizo's head and perched there in a crouch. Taizo could hear her opening her boxed lunch.

"Hey, c'mon!" he shouted, and shook his head violently in an attempt to dislodge her. Ranma's soft-soled shoes seemed almost like they had glue on them, and her ankles as though they were made of rubber. No matter how he moved his head, Ranma stayed stubbornly attached, and largely undisturbed.

"Shoulda respected your sensei," she taunted, and poked him in the nose with a chopstick. She took another bite, and Taizo gave up and opened his own lunch. "What you were doing was concentrating your ki in your feet. Not a bad idea, and I've seen more than one technique based on the idea or somethin' like it, but it's totally the wrong path for this," she said, and Taizo did his best to listen carefully over the sound of blood roaring in his ears. "And meditation was way off, but you had ta figure that one out for yourself." Taizo sighed, and ate a few bites.

"Any ideas, Teach?" Taizo asked when he was calm enough. "Or are you just trying to set me up so you can find out who I am tonight?"

"Hey, I promised to teach you, and I'm doin' my best!" Ranma protested. "Besides, I've got a pretty good idea of who you are already." Taizo did his best to hide the alarm that washed over his face, and was perversely grateful that Ranma was perched in perhaps the only place where it was probable that she wouldn't notice.

"Oh?" Taizo asked, controlling his voice as best he could.

"Mmm hmmm," Ranma hummed. "You gave away too much this morning." She leaned forward, so that she could look Taizo in the eyes. "One," she said, holding out a finger, "You're a good cook, and you've got a fighting style that's centered around it. Two," she added a second finger, "you're one of the girls from Nerima. Three," she added a third, "you're someone that Herb'll put up with." Ranma grinned, and grabbed her chopsticks with the had she'd used to tick off points. "You are Ukyou," Ranma declared, punctuating each syllable with a poke to Taizo's forehead with her chopsticks. Taizo did his very best to keep a straight face, but Ranma wouldn't be fooled. "Ha!" she laughed, and straightened out.

"It makes sense too, you know," Ranma said, resuming her meal. "I never stopped to talk to you after everything happened, and you spent ten years tracking me down before."

"Oh?" Taizo managed, his voice uneven.

"Yeah. Sorry, Ucchan, but you're kinda predictable," Ranma said, and finished the last of her bento. She hopped down lightly from Taizo's head and grinned warmly. "Don't worry, though, our deal still stands. Figure this out and I'll tell you the whole story." Taizo perked up.

"You promise?" he asked. Ranma pumped her fist.

"A martial artist's word is good as gold!" she declared, and Taizo smiled hopefully. Ranma wandered off back toward the farm, leaving Taizo to finish his lunch alone. When he was done and, more importantly, was reasonably certain that he was alone, Taizo pumped his own fist into the air.

"Yes," he hissed in glee, though not with half as much emotion as he felt. A moment later, though, he realized that he was still trapped in his horse stance, and began to struggle madly to free himself.

- - - - -

Three hours later, Ranma was calf-deep in the cool water of her second rice paddy, carefully yanking out the little sprouting weeds that inevitably tried to grow alongside, and crowd out, her crop. Weeding is a never-ending task on any farm; left unchecked, they will crowd out and kill even the hardiest of crops. On Ranma's farm, it was even moreso. She refused to use pesticide or herbicide, and the lack of mechanization of any kind meant that the fields demanded constant attention. Ranma heard a splash as someone joined her in the rice paddy, and a glance between her legs revealed it to be Taizo. He had failed twice more in the past three hours (Ranma had sent him flying both times), and his frustration was showing clearly on his face.

"Giving up?" Ranma asked, a bit surprised. "I didn't guess you for a quitter."

"No," Taizo said. "I'm trying to think, and I think better when I'm doing something." He bent over in the row to Ranma's left and began to weed it. They worked together for about ten minutes, and for that time the only sound that broke their silence was the sloshing of the water in the paddy.

"Stumped?" Ranma finally asked, carefully yanking a weed that she'd managed to miss on her last pass through the field, a few days earlier. The thing had a taproot, which had wormed its way deeply into the soil; if she didn't pull it out whole, it'd grow back.

"More or less," Taizo said, a little behind her. "I think that the way you're trying to explain what I'm supposed to do is throwing me off, but it's the only clue I've got." Ranma frowned.

"Words that describe what I'm tryin' to get you to do don't exist. I told ya that yesterday," she said. The last of the weed's taproot finally pulled free, and she inspected it carefully to make sure that it hadn't broken off in the ground. It hadn't.

"Then use a different metaphor! Talk around the outside of whatever you're trying to get at! Do _something_!" Taizo shouted, and threw a weed at Ranma in frustration. She snatched it out of the air with ease and relayed it to the little pile she'd made on the edge of the paddy. "This whole lean in thing is nonsense. It's like asking 'how high is up?'" Ranma straightened up and stretched.

"C'mon," she said, and sloshed toward the edge of the rice paddy. Taizo sighed and followed her. "Okay," she continued, when they were out of the field. "I'm not really any good with words, so I'm gonna try and show you how I do the kazesenken. Think that'll help you any?"

"Can't hurt," Taizo shrugged. Ranma concentrated for a moment, and then seemed to flow outward a bit. Taizo was startled, but then the image that Ranma was projecting wavered, and started to twist.

"Okay, I'm pushing out a battle aura to try and give you something to see here," Ranma explained. "This aint easy, though, so pay attention." Taizo squinted and, after about a minute's examination, realized that the rippling and twisting of Ranma's projected image seemed to radiate from her center, then curl up and back around in all directions. Her ki was moving, in short, almost like it was wrapped around a doughnut with a minutely small central hole. He took a few steps counterclockwise around Ranma, to try to look at her ki patterns from the side. Taizo quickly found, however, that no matter which angle he looked at Ranma from (he leapt upward and checked from above, to be certain), the effect looked identical—a round or oval tube of ki that, he finally realized, was spiraling just barely around the outside, while the whole construct was rotating slowly around its central axis. After landing, he fell onto his rear in amazement, and Ranma released her techniques.

"No wonder you couldn't figure out a word for it," he breathed in awe.

"Well," Ranma said carefully, not quite sure what Taizo meant. "I need to lean out of the world in order to use the kazesenken. The world's everywhere, so I need to use my ki to push against everywhere." She thought for a moment, then nodded. "Yeah, push is probably a better word than lean." Taizo shook his head.

"Do you have any idea what you were doing?" he asked.

"Didn't I just say?" Ranma asked. Taizo shook his head.

"Ranma, you used your ki to create a four-dimensional hypertorus in three-dimensional space,"  
Taizo explained. Ranma blinked twice.

"What's that?" she asked.

"It's a shape in theoretical math that I learned about in college," Taizo explained, waving his hand vaguely. "It should be impossible to create in three-dimensional space."

"Well, it was pretty tough to get right when I was still learning it," Ranma admitted, "and it's still a bit sketchy when I need part o' me to be physical while the rest o' me's untouchable." Taizo nodded dumbly, thinking. "Math, huh? Damn," Ranma muttered. "Probably woulda been a lot easier to figure out if I hadn't slept through class all the time." Taizo blinked.

"Yeah..." he said, and slowly began to smile. "It probably would be." He hopped to his feet and ran towards the house. Ranma shrugged and returned to the field.

Two hours later, when she finished for the day and returned to the house, she found Taizo hunched over a few sheets of paper. They had been filled with long strings of calculations (many, with errors, had been scribbled out), and somewhere near the bottom of the third, Taizo had circled an equation that seemed to be made up of far more letters than numbers. On a fourth sheet, which he had sectioned off into quarters, he was drawing arcs in strange combinations. A half hour later, when Ranma finished dinner and served Taizo a bowl of ramen, he didn't even look up. After a little prodding, though, he began to slurp his noodles absently as he continued to draw. When she finished with her own ramen, Ranma peered over Taizo's shoulder in curiosity. He'd filled the first three quarters of his page with strange, arcing shapes, and in the fourth quarter seemed to be combining them. Not really understanding, she stepped outside and began to do her evening workout.

It was dark by the time that Taizo left the house, equations and drawings in hand. He'd brought the kerosine-fueled camp lantern that Ranma often used to light the inside of her house along with, and had lit it. Ranma was finishing her last kata for the evening, and walked over to him.

"Done with your drawings?" she asked.

"Yeah, I think I know what to do now," Taizo said, a little hopeful excitement creeping into his voice.

"Oh?" Ranma asked.

"I'm going to try to make a four-dimensional hypersphere," he explained, and pointed to the fourth, super-complex drawing that he'd made. "It's a lot like your four-dimensional hypersphere, but it's opposite in principle. Your hypertorus radiates from and rotates along a central point. This should bubble around and rotate through a central point."

"Wait..." Ranma said, her brow furrowing. "You can't be around something and go through it."

"Not in three-dimensional space," Taizo said. "I know it's weird, but it makes sense once you get your head around it. The language you have to use is all messed up, though. Words don't really exist that describe what these things do accurately. We're built to think in three dimensions, not four." Without waiting for a response, Taizo set off for the training grounds. Ranma hesitated for a minute, trying to make sense of what Taizo had just showed her. Eventually, she began to smile.

"Words don't exist..." she said to herself, and chased after Taizo.

- - - - -

Hours later, the camp lantern had been extinguished, the papers containing the incomprehensible math that lay underneath Taizo's attempts pinned beneath it. Ranma watched Taizo from her preferred perch on the obsidian boulder. He stood in a loose stance, eyes closed; the moon cast his face in a silvery sheen from its high perch in the exceptionally clear night sky. He hadn't asked Ranma to test him yet, and wasn't sure that he would make her deadline—it couldn't be far away, now. He knew, though, in the tiny part of his mind that wasn't completely occupied by creating impossible spheres with his ki, that he was on the very edge of something monumental. He might fail, and be forced to reveal his identity to Ranma tonight, but he sensed that he'd have the essence of the technique before too much longer. If not tonight, then tomorrow, or the next day.

Truth be told, he was thrilled beyond words. This would be the first real technique that he'd ever created, and to do it, he had to do something that violated the very physical principles that made his existence possible. He finished spinning another rotating bubble of ki into place, and the sense of closeness, a vertigo mixed with elation, became stronger. He could feel things that should be impossible—the pips of energy created by the blades of grass beneath his feet as they slowly photosynthesized the moon's light, the groaning pressure that the rock of the mountain endured from beneath, even the little jolts of electricity from Ranma's heart as it beat. He was beginning to see that Ranma's first metaphor, that he needed to lean in to the world, hadn't been wholly inaccurate, from a sensational perspective.

Taizo paused to consider his work. He'd spun dozens of rotating ki-spheres around and through himself. The concentration that he had to expend to maintain each of them was significant, but the array as a whole was horrific. It was almost done, though. Taking a deep breath, he began to spin one last sphere, a huge one that would encompass all the others. It was much easier than the rest, and as he finished it, the whole array seemed to become easier to manage. Taizo opened his eyes, and met Ranma's gaze. As he did so, he pulled, just a bit, with his ki, and the massively complex hypersphere begin to rotate around a vertical axis. As it did, he felt something unfathomably and indescribably strange, but vaguely pleasant.

Ranma met his gaze, and smiled. She rolled into a crouch on the boulder; Taizo tried to nod at her, but found that he couldn't move his head. Ranma seemed to sense his permission, though, and exploded off the rock. Her flying kick, the same that had sent him soaring twice before that day, smashed into his forehead. Taizo felt the pain of the impact, but his body did not move a micrometer—even the skin on his forehead remained rigid before the force of Ranma's assault. Ranma recovered, faded to Taizo's left, and tried an uppercut. It, too, accomplished nothing.

Ranma fell back, and an orb of bright blue ki formed in her hands. Before Taizo could react, Ranma's mouko takabisha splashed around Taizo's form. Taizo was shocked; the hyperspheres of his ki disassembled Ranma's ki attack before it made it to his body, the blue energy flowing into invisibility along indescribably strange trajectories. Taizo released his ki-construct and began to breathe heavily. The places where Ranma had attacked him hurt, and began to bruise slightly, but he still couldn't feel any effects from Ranma's ki blast.

"Feels weird, doesn't it?" Ranma asked, her face split by a proud grin. Taizo nodded, still panting.

"Couldn't breathe," he managed. Ranma nodded.

"Same thing happened to me when I was figurin' out the kazesenken," Ranma said. "If my lungs weren't real, I couldn't breathe any air in. If you jiggle," Ranma paused and grimaced at the inaccuracy of the word, "yeah, I guess jiggle your ki right, you can have parts of you in and parts of you out." Taizo gulped in one last deep breath, then nodded in acknowledgment. Ranma picked up her camp lantern and Taizo's papers, then began to lead the way back to the house.

"Whatcha gonna call it?" she asked over her shoulder. Taizo began to follow, and grinned a bit.

"I think... I'll call it the morisenken.," he said. "It's the opposite side of your kazesenken, right? Besides, I'm guessing that the idea came from your father's umisenken and yamasenken." Ranma blinked in surprise, then stopped. Taizo paused next to her.

"You're not Ucchan, are you?" Ranma asked quietly. "She wasn't really around much when Ryu Kumon showed up." Taizo shrugged.

"Well..." he said thoughtfully, "who wins our bet?" Ranma looked over at Taizo, who was still grinning, then up at the moonlit sky.

"Call it a draw? Seems like it's right around midnight to me," she said. Taizo considered her proposal for a minute.

"I can live with that," he said. "This body's driving me nuts anyway." He started toward Ranma's house, and after a moment's confused hesitation, Ranma began to follow.

"Aren't you gonna tell me?" she asked.

"It'll be easier to show you," Taizo replied. They finished the short trek in silence. Once they entered the house, Taizo dug through his pack, and eventually produced a pair of heavy, plastic, screw-top water bottles. Ranma had noticed them yesterday, when she had searched his things, but had ignored them. Taizo handed one of the two bottles to her.

"If you decide you want to use it," he said, and began to unscrew the cap of the remaining bottle. Ranma looked at the bottle, then back at Taizo. He finished unscrewing the cap, closed his eyes, then poured the water contained therein over his head. His form shrank almost instantaneously, reshaping itself into one that Ranma remembered clearly, though it was older, harder, and much more weathered than it had been.

"Akane?" she exclaimed in shock. "What are _you_ doing here?" Akane's eyes were still the color of molten chocolate, and her short-cropped hair was that strange shade of bluish black that Ranma had never seen anywhere else. If her bust seemed a touch smaller and her hips a bit thinner, it was because the tiny amount of body fat that she'd once carried as a teenager had mostly been melted away by the corded, well-defined muscles that she'd developed in her years on the road. All told, Ranma realized distantly, she didn't look _that_ much different than she had in her male form, face, hair, and size aside.

"Glad that worked," Akane muttered to herself, and released a breath that she hadn't noticed she was holding. To Ranma, she continued, "We weren't sure how well the chiisuiton would work with an instant jusenkyo curse. It locked me in a guy's body pretty well, but there wasn't any way to know whether or not the magic would last long enough to let me unlock it."

"That's great and all, but what the hell are you doing here?" Ranma repeated. "I woulda bet on Nabiki learning martial arts and chasing me down before you would." Akane finally met Ranma's gaze directly, then broke it with a blush. She scratched at the nape of her neck, then looked back at Ranma.

"Sorry 'bout all this," she said, and smiled faintly.

--A/N--

Howdy. So... Taizo was Akane after all, as many of you predicted—I told you all from the get-go that his identity wouldn't be too tough to figure out, a few misdirections aside. Moreover, as I promised a reviewer in private after the first chapter, this is no lockfic, and Akane is not permanently cursed. Taizo was a creation of convenience, and the answer to a question—how do you sneak up to and get to know someone who's been living in a near-paranoid (well, they _were_ really out to get him) individual who would likely flee the moment he knew who you were? Answer: create a disguise that nobody can break without serious work.

The next chapter will move us much closer to the central event that's hiding behind everything in this fic, as Akane gets a chance to tell us what happened to her after things went so very wrong. It may be a shorter chapter. It may also be a chapter that takes me a little while to get out; I'm hellaciaously busy right now, and have only gotten this much out by writing it in between the pages of an immensely long term paper that I'm working on as I write this.

In the meanwhile, I'll leave you with a teaser and a hint: Why would Akane, of all people, be the last person that Ranma would expect to track him down? Hope you liked the chapter!

--Translations--

Morisenken: Fist of a Thousand Forests


	4. The Scarlet Path From Heaven

Disclaimer: I don't own any of this.

Disclaimer part 2: This chapter contains frank discussion about sex as a part of relationships. It is not a lemon or a lime, and is certainly no worse than anything you'd get in a middle school health class, but be forewarned. If you've ever laughed at a dirty joke, you'll be fine.

The Lady of the Mountain

by: Flashfyre5

Chapter 4: The Scarlet Path From Heaven

Akane drew in a deep breath, then let it out slowly before she spoke again. "Well... she said. "To be honest, I'm here hoping to find peace, like I said." Ranma blinked.

"Peace?" she asked. "Are you _sure_ you're Akane?"

"Jerk," Akane deadpanned, and flicked her on the nose. "I'm thirty-one. Did you really expect that I'd be the same hothead you knew when I was a kid?"

"Well... yeah," Ranma said. "I mean, you've got that anger ki attack."

"It's not exactly anger," Akane grimaced a bit. "At least, not like you're thinking. It's a long story."

"I'm starting to guess that," Ranma said. There was a long silence. Akane eventually met Ranma's gaze, albeit a bit sheepishly.

"Ranma... before I tell you this, I need to say something," she finally said, and keeled next to the table. Ranma sat down across from her. "What you did was wrong... That's not what I meant to say," she shook her head. "What you did hurt me terribly, right or wrong, but what I did afterward was unforgivable." Quickly, Akane leaned forward and prostrated herself in front of the shocked redhead. Her voice a bit muffled by the floor, she continued, "But I want to tell you how sorry I am anyway. You didn't deserve what I did."

"Get up," Ranma said, tugging at her shoulder. "It was a bad day for everyone, and Mousse made everything worse. I understand." Akane rose slowly, almost reluctantly, and met Ranma's gaze again. For some reason that Ranma couldn't understand, she was blushing.

"No, you don't," Akane said. "But you deserve an explanation, at least." She sighed. "But for that I'm going to have to start at the beginning." Ranma nodded. "You see, the day you first showed up at the dojo-"

"Nah, I got all that," Ranma interrupted her. "Pop and your dad were tryin' to make you marry some weirdo you didn't know the first thing about. Of course you were pissed. I was too" She shrugged. "Not a very good way to get things started." Akane shook her head slowly.

"No, you really don't," Akane said. "You see, when Daddy told us about the engagement, I was annoyed, but only kind of angry. It wasn't right for him to spring that sort of thing on us, but even if I got stuck with some boy I didn't really like, I thought that at least it'd be helpful, in a sense."

"Oh, the perv squad!" Ranma grinned.

"Yeah," Akane agreed. "If I was engaged, they'd have to give up on me. It's not right to try to date someone who's got a fiancee. But..." she hesitated. "There was another thing. You see, by the time you showed up, the boys at school had been at it for months, and when a girl just keeps shutting them down like that, rumors start to get around about what kind of person a girl likes. I thought that, worst case, being engaged to a boy would stop that." Ranma nodded, and Akane took another deep breath.

"The rumors..." Akane trailed off and but her lip. "Ranma, do you remember the stuff I told you when I first got here?" she asked. Ranma thought for a moment. "The stuff I told you in the bathroom," she added. Ranma froze, remembering how Akane had scooted across the floor of the bathroom, a towel across his waist, in an effort to hide a particular part of his body.

"Oh," Ranma said, and then, because she decided that it really wasn't enough, added another, "Oh." Akane stared at the floor, her face looking as though it had been sunburned.

"I needed some way to show everyone that I wasn't really interested in girls," she explained. "I knew that I actually _was_..." she bit her lip. "But how do you tell your best friend that you want to drag her off the the janitor's closet and rip her dress off? And that if her boyfriend came along, that you'd be fine with it? It was... so confusing."

"Yuka?" Ranma asked after Akane didn't continue. She nodded.

"She was the first girl I had a crush on," Akane said. "And it was only a year or two after I got a crush on Dr. Tofu. It was awful." She took in a slow breath. "And I knew what kind of life those girls had to lead. It's not like it used to be, but..." Akane didn't continue. Ranma nodded. After a minute, Akane met Ranma's gaze.

"And then there you were," Akane almost whispered. "I was annoyed that I might get engaged to a boy, but then there was this short redhead with this _body_..." Akane bit her lower lip again, but smiled this time. "I think I had it bad the moment I met you. It was partly relief, because I was pretty sure that Daddy wouldn't insist on an engagement with another girl, but partly... something else." Akane paused. "And then we sparred, and you dodged that punch by leaning sideways, and I saw you checking _me_ out, and my heart just stopped. I couldn't breathe. When we finished, I saw that you were just as embarrassed as I was, and I _knew_ that it wasn't just me." Ranma blushed, then nodded slowly and smiled a bit.

"So you went off to have your bath, and I thought to myself, Akane, the girl of your naughtiest dreams just showed up, and she likes you back. Are you going to just stand around, or are you going to do something about it?" Akane said. She sighed faintly. "And right then and there, I thought that I was ready for the life, the embarrassment, all of it. I decided that I was going to join you in the furo, and ask you straight up, and if you felt like I thought you felt, I was going to ask you out, and to hell with the consequences.

"And then you saw me," Ranma said. Akane nodded.

"Yeah... I saw you," she agreed. "I walked into the furo, and I took a nice long look at you, and..." She paused. "Ranma, you need to understand that I walked into the furo expecting to see the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, naughty magazines included, and instead I saw the most handsome man I'd ever seen, naughty magazines included. I was so out of it that my brain just shut down. I panicked. I grabbed a rock, and I figured I'd just drown you so I could forget about the whole day. I was terrified that everything was going to suddenly spill out into the open. I..." she closed her eyes, "realized just how far from being ready for a relationship with a girl I really was." Akane paused and, for perhaps the first time in Ranma's life, the redhead had absolutely nothing to say.

"And then I found out about the curse," Akane continued, "and we got engaged, and you turned out to be a loudmouth, but the most casually sexy loudmouth I'd ever seen. You'd walk around topless as a girl with the most incredible chest, and then you'd tease me because mine were smaller. You'd work out shirtless as a guy, and you were just so much better than I was. My dreams turned into a nightmare in an instant, and it was a nightmare that I couldn't wake up from. I was turned on and angry _all the time_."

"So..." Akane said, sighing again. "I did the only thing I knew how to do. I fought it, tooth and nail, every bit of it. I decided that the only way to make sure that you never found out about how I felt was to make sure that you didn't like me back.. As things got worse between us, I got pretty sure that I'd been wrong about our first fight in the dojo anyway."

Akane stopped here for a while, marshaling her thoughts. Ranma, meanwhile, tried her best to sort through what Akane had told her; in some ways, it contradicted everything that the redhead had ever assumed about Akane, but on the other hand, it made an awful sort of sense. Ranma had always taken the fact that Akane was just an angry person as an article of faith—after all, her anger characterized almost every interaction that the two had ever had. On the other hand, Kuno was the only other boy that Akane had ever directed her anger at in the way that she so frequently had vented it at Ranma. Ryouga was a dear friend. Mousse was a weirdo, but Akane had always treated him decently, even after he had kidnapped and almost cursed her to become a duck. Even Happosai was simply malleted and disposed of, a nuisance, but not a target of real anger. Perhaps most damning, Genma, with an attitude even worse than Ranma's and who was actively trying to get Akane married against her will, hadn't merited the acrimony that Ranma had. She squirmed at the thought. Ranma had gotten the same treatment as had the only other person that Akane had categorically rejected, and even if, as Akane claimed, it was for rather different reasons.

"Akane, you don't hafta keep going," Ranma said eventually. Akane rubbed her forehead and sighed.

"Yeah, I do," she said. "Part of it is that you deserve to hear all this, but part of it is that I need to tell you, for my own good. I've been keeping these feelings stuffed away inside of me for almost half of my life, and nobody can ever really understand what I'm feeling except you." She blushed a bit at this, but charged onward. "Ranma, I need to put this behind me. Everything's been resolved except for you and me, and it's been driving me crazy for years." She sighed. "And you're hiding on a mountain. I think you could probably stand to talk some of this through too." Ranma pulled at her pigtail in embarrassment, and Akane was suddenly struck by how little the redhead had changed in all the long years that they'd been apart. She was older, certainly, more set in her ways, and definitely a better martial artist, but Ranma was still very much the bullheaded, stubborn young man she'd been in her youth. Akane shook her head; the way Ranma had set up the pickle-selling trip to dig through her guest's things was exactly the sort of thing she would've done when she was sixteen. Ranma realized that Akane was staring at her as she tugged on her pigtail and stopped.

"Sorry," Ranma said, sheepishly.

"It's fine," Akane said. "Anyway, then Shampoo showed up, and Ukyou, and everything got even crazier, and I was sure that it'd just been me, you know?" She smiled a bit. "So I kept everything up, and I figured that you'd pick one of the other girls, and that would be that. I went to Ryugenzawa partly hoping that you'd make your choice while I was gone." The silence after this was cavernous, and when Akane spoke again, it was barely a whisper. "It didn't exactly work out that way, did it?" Ranma shook her head.

"Ryugenzawa changed everything," Akane admitted. "For the first time, I knew for sure that you felt _something_ for me, and since you were fighting the engagement just as hard as I was, it was a good bet that what you felt was more than friendship. I was so happy, and excited, but I knew right then and there, when you held my hand while we were leaving the forest, that I was in really big trouble." Ranma fidgeted at this and opened her mouth to say something, but changed her mind.

"What?" Akane asked.

"Nothin'." Ranma said, and shook her head. "It can wait 'till you're done."

"Are you sure?" Akane asked.

"Look, you said that this is about you figuring stuff out for yourself, right?" Ranma asked. Akane nodded. "Well, you've probably been thinkin' about what you were gonna say for a long time. I got stuff to say about all this too, but I can wait my turn." Akane blinked in surprise.

"That's... I never would've expected something like that out of you," she admitted. Ranma laughed.

"Hey, if there's one thing you learn from farming, it's patience," she replied. Akane smiled.

"Well, anyway, Ryugenzawa got me thinking," Akane continued. "About you and me. I... I knew that I wanted both of you but..." Akane winced. "You probably don't even remember—you got changed so often those days. A car splashed us, and you changed, of course, but I didn't take my hand back. I didn't want to. We walked through two towns and got a train ticket before I finally did, and the whole while, I didn't care in the least that everybody that saw us probably thought I was a lesbian." Akane sighed. "When we got onto the train, you still weren't talking much, so I just sat there and thought. The more I thought, the more scared I got." Ranma's face screwed up in confusion.

"Who cares? It's just holding hands," Ranma protested. "Nobody's gonna freak over a coupla girls holding hands in public."

"Yeah, it was just holding hands," Akane admitted. "That time." She looked at Ranma directly. "Ranma, I don't do things by half-measures. When I decided to track you down, I spent nine years at it and risked trapping myself in a man's body forever. Every time I got some kind of trick to beat you up, I didn't show you the least bit of mercy." She paused, and laughed. "Hell, you ate my cooking back then. You know how I am."

"Yeah," Ranma agreed, laughing nervously. A faint part of him expected Akane to bash him for doing so, but no blow was forthcoming.

"I realized on the train ride home that if I decided to be with you, for real, that I wouldn't stop at holding hands in public," Akane continued. "And that whatever gender you were wouldn't matter to me. Everybody would know how I felt about you. Both of you." Unable to stay silent, Ranma spoke.

"How did you feel about me?" she asked softly. Akane sighed.

"Honestly? I loved you," Akane admitted, then smiled wryly. "And hated you," she amended. "Usually at the same time, too. When you smiled at me, though... it was like the whole world stopped, and my insides would just melt." Ranma blushed, and suddenly found her thumbs, which she'd begun to twiddle without noticing, to be incredibly interesting. Akane sighed.

"Phoenix Mountain was..." she trailed off. Ranma froze for a moment, then continued to twiddle her thumbs.

"Yeah," she agreed simply.

"That moment when I woke up, afterward," Akane said. "I would have done anything if you would've asked me. It was all sort of fuzzy and distant, but I knew what you'd done for me. How you'd fought Saffron... how you killed him. Then after, the water was going back to Jusenkyo, and I realized that you could be cured. I could have you, even if it wasn't quite the way I'd hoped. Well, that didn't work out either." She laughed sadly to herself and shook her head.

"And then there was the wedding," Akane said. Ranma finally summoned the courage to look at her again.

"Was it just the nanniichuan?" Ranma asked.

"The nanniichuan and you, together," Akane replied. "I wouldn't have agreed to Daddy's plan without the water. It was like Jusenkyo after Saffron. I thought I could finally stop fighting how I felt if you were cured. When Happosai drank it..." she shrugged. "Well, let's just say I was relieved that your other fiancees crashed the party." Akane smiled at Ranma, who returned the gesture briefly.

"Well, then... you left," Akane said, parsing her words with deliberate care.

"Akane, look, I-" Ranma attempted, but Akane held up a hand.

"Ranma, you had a right to choose her," she said sadly. "I had to come to terms with that a long time ago."

"It aint like that!" Ranma cried. Akane laughed bitterly, scorn clear in her tone.

"Whatever," she said, trying not to sneer. "Are you going to let me finish?"

"Hell, no!" Ranma growled, and rose to her feet. "This is bullshit! You never let me explain then, and you're not letting me explain now!"

"Explain what?" Akane roared, leaping up. "Ranma, you slept with Shampoo! No potions, no magic, no _nothing_! Mousse saw everything, and he told us!"

"It wasn't like that!" Ranma protested.

"Did you sleep with her?" Akane demanded. Ranma didn't answer immediately. "Ranma," she roared again, "did you sleep with her or not?" This time, when Ranma didn't answer her, Akane let the silence stretch until it was uncomfortable.

"Yeah," Ranma finally admitted, her voice soft.

"No magic or anything? You did it of your own free will?" Akane asked. Her voice was calmer, but it wavered just a bit. Ranma bowed her head in shame, then nodded it once.

"There's more to it than that," Ranma added weakly. To her shock, Akane smiled, just a bit.

"And I promise that I'll hear you out this time," Akane said. "Just... let me finish first, please? I don't know if I can do this again." Ranma thought about this for some time before she finally nodded. She flopped back to the floor sullenly, then crossed her arms and legs, waiting. Akane, for a moment, considered relenting, and allowing Ranma a chance to tell her side of the story, a side that Akane desperately wanted to hear. That, however, was the problem; Akane knew that she'd never finish if she let Ranma have her turn now, and Shodai-sensei had told her that she must tell Ranma everything if Akane was to find the peace that she so desperately hoped for. Slowly, Akane sat down.

"So, I'm gone," Ranma prompted. Akane nodded.

"I was so confused," Akane said. "I thought that I never wanted to see you again after you and Shampoo... I was hurt in a way that I'd never been before, and I latched on to Yuka." Akane blushed. "I told you how that ended up last week. After that, it was like a dam burst. I couldn't stop. I just went on and on..." Akane shook her head. "It's strange, you know. I'd tried so hard for so long to keep my bisexuality a secret, but everyone in school knew within six months of Jusendo." Ranma's brow furrowed in confusion.

"I don't get it," she said. "Why'd you stop caring, after you fought so hard?"

"I didn't understand either, not for a long time," Akane said. "It was like it just didn't matter to me anymore, with you gone. Shodai-sensei—I'll get to him in a minute—helped me figure out that what I was trying to do was prove to myself that someone, anyone besides my family, still loved me." Ranma nodded in cautious comprehension after a moment's thought.

"Anyway, that sort of thing kept going when I went to college," Akane continued. "At one point, I realized that I was on my third girlfriend in as many weeks, and it didn't even bother me. I learned a lot about math, physical education, and, umm...," she blushed, "anatomy at college." Ranma, despite the seriousness of the situation, couldn't suppress a laugh.

"Akane," she said, shaking her head. "Look, if you've had as much sex as you say you've had, why are you so embarrassed about it? Shouldn't it be kinda no big deal?" Akane's blush deepened.

"I'm not embarrassed about the sex," Akane said. "I'm embarrassed about the pervert thing."

"The pervert thing?" Ranma asked.

"Think about it for a minute," Akane said. Ranma obliged her.

"What, that you used to call me a perv all the time?" Ranma asked. Akane nodded.

"I feel like such a hypocrite," Akane admitted with a sigh. "With everyone else, it's just sex, and you're right that it starts to lose its importance after a while. With you... I made your life hell for a year because I wanted to hide how I felt about myself. That's just wrong."

"Aww, it's no big deal," Ranma said. "Pop called me worse all the time. You get used to that kind of crap after a while" Akane's jaw dropped a bit in surprise.

"Really?" she asked, amazed.

"Yeah," Ranma said. "I mean, I didn't exactly like it, but it's not like it really bothered me or anything." She shrugged. "Part of the Saotome school is tossin' and taking insults. Hell, we've got kata for it. Don't worry about it." Akane smiled fully, for the first time that night, and felt as though an enormous weight that she'd never noticed she was carrying was lifted from her.

"Well, I knew that my sleeping around was getting out of hand during my senior year at college," Akane continued. "I caught Ryouga changing back from his cursed form in my bathroom for the first time, and my only thought then was 'what's one more guy?' It took me a week to realize it, but I knew then that I had a problem." It was Ranma's turn to be surprised now.

"You mean you caught him red-handed and you didn't slaughter him?" Ranma asked. Akane nodded. "Damn, the only reason that I didn't tell you was because I thought he'd never survive, and it turned out to be no big deal."

"I probably would've killed him if I'd caught him before college," Akane admitted. "After all that I'd been getting into, though, what he did really wasn't that big by comparison."

"Oh?" Ranma asked. Akane laughed.

"If you ask me nicely sometime, maybe I'll show you," Akane grinned, a disturbingly feral twinkle in her eye. Ranma blushed, and Akane couldn't resist continuing. "You probably haven't even heard of some of the stuff I tried in college. It was pretty wild." Ranma squirmed, and Akane couldn't suppress her laughter any longer. She laughed a huge, openhearted belly laugh, the sound of it unlike anything that Ranma had never heard her make.

"Oh, my," Akane managed as she came down off of the laugh. She wiped her eyes a bit and took a breath. "How could I have ever called you a pervert? You're such a prude." Ranma, feeling a bit petulant, stuck her tongue out. "Don't stick it out unless you plan to use it," Akane taunted. The tongue vanished faster than Akane's eyes could track with a muffled 'ulp.' Ranma clapped her hands over her mouth, and Akane laughed again.

"After college, I told Daddy about everything," Akane said after calming down. "He was surprised, but he took it better than I thought he would. He introduced me to Shodai-sensei."

"You keep mentioning this guy," Ranma said. "Who is he?"

"Shodai-sensei runs a little Shaolin monastery near Fukuoka," Akane explained. "Daddy met him when he was out training with Happosai. I..." she paused. "I think he's a sakadagami."

"Wow," Ranma said. Akane nodded.

"It's so hard to explain what Shodai-sensei's like," Akane said. "It's like he's made of serenity, and because he's so still, he can see into all the ripples that you're made of. He saw through me the minute he met me." Akane paused. "Daddy sent me to Shodai-sensei's temple so that he could help me come to terms with myself. Everyone else thought it was just to learn kung fu, but what I spent most of my time doing there was meditating. Shodai-sensei tried to help me cut myself away from my shame and guilt, but I wasn't ready to give it up."

"Guess you're not ready for Nirvana," Ranma panned.

"Not this lifetime," Akane agreed. "Shodai-sensei helped me learn a lot about myself, though. He helped me understand why I had been so afraid of my sexuality, and how tightly I'd tied that to my sense of romantic love, after living with you for so long. It's really no surprise that I slept around so much after you left. I spent a year and a half trying to find serenity in his temple."

"And you're still looking for it?" Ranma asked. Akane nodded.

"The more I meditated, the more we realized that I'd bound myself up with how I felt about you and I," Akane explained. "It went all wrong, and it ended worse, but I'd still loved you more than I'd ever loved anyone else. It was like a hole in my soul, warping everything around it. Shodai-sensei eventually decided that the only way that I'd be able to heal was to find you again and talk my way through my feelings. So... here I am."

"With what? A nine-year gap?" Ranma asked.

"You're not an easy person to find," Akane shrugged. Ranma thought about this for a little bit.

"You must think a lot of this Shodai guy to follow his advice for that long," Ranma said.

"He was right," Akane admitted. "I'd known that you were my problem for months when he told me that I needed to find you. It seemed like the only sensible thing to do." Ranma thought for a while more. It had been almost an hour since they'd returned to the house, and the moon had crossed the sky quickly enough that a sliver of it could now be seen through the window next to the table. Its pale light danced around the outskirts of the warm, yellow light that Ranma's camp lantern shed, and left the room looking like it was cast in gold and silver.

"This is a lot to take in," Ranma finally said, and scratched the underside of her jaw. Akane nodded in sympathy.

"I understand," Akane said. "I had years to figure all of this out. You just got dumped on with it all. If you need time to think about it before you want to talk about Shampoo, it's okay."

"I probably should," Ranma agreed. "Part of me wants to just tell you everything now, but I'd probably just screw it up if I did."

"I can wait," Akane said. "Another day's wait isn't going to make any difference after this long."

"Thanks," Ranma said. Akane patted her on her shoulder and then, after a moment's hesitation, pulled Ranma into an embrace. The redhead only hesitated a moment before returning the gesture.

"Thank you," Akane said softly. "For listening. I can't tell you how much it means to me." Ranma nodded, her hair rustling in Akane's ear.

"Don't worry about it," Ranma grinned, releasing her and leaning back. "I did make ya a promise, though."

"You can wait with Shampoo," Akane repeated.

"And I will," Ranma nodded. "But I made a promise to explain the girl in the picture, and I'm gonna. You're gonna have to wait till tomorrow for the whole story, though." Akane nodded. Ranma took in a deep breath, then sighed mightily.

"Her name's Tao Hua," Ranma said. "She's my daughter."

--A/N--

And now we finally get to the crux of things. As I promised, the girl in the photo's really at the heart of why Ranma left Nerima; if you're patient, you'll get the rest of the history shortly. If you're bothered by the heavy dialogue format of this chapter, I'm sorry. I needed to cover seven years worth of information that was pretty well spread out, and doing that in a series of flashbacks would have been a nightmare. You'll get a nice, long flashback in a chapter or so.

And yes, Tao Hua is an Amazon name. The bastardization that you'd see in the manga would be 'Towel,' though the name has a real meaning in Chinese. See the Translations section below, if you're interested.

I'm finally pushing through the worst of my end-of-semester work; I've got (in addition to my 'fic writing here) over forty pages worth of draft to sort through and revise, but that's light work that I'll be done with fairly shortly. After that, it's just finals and whatnot, then the finish line. Given as I suspect that I'm over halfway through this fic as things now stand, that's probably pretty good progress.

I want to say something now that I noticed after posting the first chapter of this fic, and have been really humbled by. I've gotten over 2,000 unique visitors on this fic so far, which is nice and all, but 's ip tracking feature is approximately the coolest thing ever. I've got fourteen people reading from the Russian Federation, two in Romania, and some brave soul from Brunei Darussalam—literally, people from every continent on earth. If that's not the coolest damn thing ever, I don't know what is.

--Translations--

Tao Hua: Blossom of the Tao. Note: This is Chinese, not Japanese.

-If you don't know what the Tao is, go Google it. It's the central concept of Taoism.

Nirvana: A state of full enlightenment, where one is freed from the cycles of reincarnation.

Sakadagami: A person well down the Buddhist road to enlightenment. Such a person, in the Buddhist tradition, will likely only need to be reborn once more before attaining a state of Nirvana.

Note: This word comes from Pali, the ancient Indian language that most Buddhist texts are written in.


	5. Growing Up

Disclaimer: I don't own any of this.

The Lady of the Mountain

by: Flashfyre5

Chapter 5: Growing Up

The sun was high enough in the sky that the obsidian boulder, which Ranma was sitting on, had become almost uncomfortably warm. In reality, it wasn't all that terribly hot, but Ranma had found that she preferred cooler temperatures ever since her hiryuu shoten ha training... or was it since the full-body cat's tongue, despite the phoenix pill? The events of that mad year, a few shining incidents aside, had long ago blurred together in Ranma's memory, and she'd never really wanted to sort through them before. She sighed.

"Was I really ever that young?" she asked the universe. Unsurprisingly, it provided no answer. She ran her hand through her hair and sighed. She glanced at the ground to her right. On the boulder next to her was the water bottle that Akane had given her; Ranma had a pretty good idea of what the water inside was, even if Akane hadn't said explicitly. Next to it was the old picture frame. Currently, it was turned to show Tao Hua. The photo was recent. Cologne had sent it a few months ago, the image captured at the girl's fourteenth birthday.

Ranma picked up the frame and caressed the image of her daughter. A part of her, which had grown every year that she'd lived on the mountainside, ached at the sight of the girl. Ranma had never seen her in person, and it hurt her in a way that she'd never imagined anything could. The yearly photographs that Cologne had sent her every year, and the occasional letter that Ranma exchanged with her daughter, were the only contact she'd ever had with Tao Hua. The three forwarding services that Ranma used to kept her location secret weren't cheap, but they permitted her a glimpse into the life of her daughter, which she treasured. She sighed again.

"Man, I'm a damn idiot," Ranma said to herself. Once again, the universe didn't respond which, though expected, was nevertheless appreciated. Ranma flipped the frame over.

The photograph on the other side had clearly been through hell. It was creased in a dozen different places, and the acid of the photograph paper had turned the blue of Akane's school uniform to a coffee-brown, but her smile was still as heartbreakingly beautiful as Ranma remembered. Nabiki had charged her a lot of money for the photo, and quite a bit more to keep the news of its acquisition under wraps, but it had been, for years and years, the only relic of Ranma's past that she had kept. It was the only relic of that past, Ranma mused, that had mattered to her.

"She doesn't hate me," Ranma whispered to herself in amazement. She hadn't slept very much last night, despite how late her conversation with Akane had run, and that central thought had been responsible for her insomnia. After Akane's reaction to her affair with Shampoo, Ranma had never questioned that the bonds that she'd once had with Akane had been well and truly severed. She still believed that she'd made the right decision by sleeping with Shampoo, the aftermath be damned, but Ranma still regretted her shortsightedness in carrying that decision out. In the years since, she'd thought of a dozen different ways that she could've gone about everything better.

And yet, Akane was here. More, she'd spent almost a decade of her life trying to find Ranma. She still wasn't sure to make of it all. Akane had seemed earnest enough last night in her desire for inner peace; if so, her presence could mean anything.

"She doesn't hate me," Ranma repeated, and stared at the water bottle.

* * *

"She doesn't hate me," Akane said to herself and shook her head. She sat alone in Ranma's hot spring, the water this morning almost scaldingly hot. She didn't mind. Truth be told, Akane had preferred heat, serious heat, ever since Jusendo. It was only in the last year or so that she'd gotten an explanation for that, and it was one that still made her uneasy. Certainly, the source of that explanation was no comfort, even if he'd helped her enormously.

Akane had slept late that morning, with a calm that she'd not had since she could remember. By the time she'd awoken, Ranma had been long gone and the morning sun had already crested Daisetsu-san. She'd made herself a light breakfast and, seeing that Ranma was nowhere in the fields, had decided to let the redhead be for the time being.

"Tao Hua," Akane said to herself, and the ease that she'd felt since the night before quavered. She'd always told herself that there was a chance, even a likelihood, given Cologne's involvement, that Ranma's tryst with Shampoo had resulted in a child, but the cold reality of the amazon girl's existence was still unsettling. Ranma had a daughter.

It changed everything. And, in a strange way, nothing. The girl wasn't here, and although Ranma had to have some way of getting a picture of her daughter, there was no other trace of Shampoo or her great-grandmother anywhere on the farm. Akane shifted in the spring, and ducked underwater. Underneath, the only sounds were the swirling of the water from her own motion and the slow bubbles from the little crack in the basin that fed the spring. She still wasn't sure how she should feel about Ranma's daughter.

After enjoying the heat of the springs for a few more minutes, Akane rose and began to dry herself off. She'd given Ranma a few hours, and now she wanted to talk.

* * *

"You're losing your touch," Akane teased as she approached Ranma's boulder. The redhead hadn't seemed to notice her approach, but she didn't seem startled either. Crouched atop the boulder, she was looking at the photo of Tao Hua. "I found you in the first place I looked this time. Your dad would throw a fit," Akane continued. Ranma smiled and looked up.

"Morning," Ranma greeted her.

"More like afternoon," Akane said, and looked up. "Normally, I'd ask why you didn't wake me, but I've got a pretty good guess." Ranma shrugged, then nodded. Akane leaned against the boulder next to Ranma, and looked at the photograph from the side. Ranma tilted it so that she could see better.

"She's beautiful," Akane said, and meant it. Ranma nodded. "What's she like?"

"I dunno," Ranma said, and the frame drooped a bit. "I've never met her." Akane's chest clenched in sympathy.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know," Akane said, and put her hand on Ranma's shoulder.

"Terms of the divorce," Ranma said wistfully. In a parody of Shampoo's pidgin Japanese, she said, "Shampoo teach daughter to be great warrior. When she become honored warrior, Shampoo send to Ranma to learn humility." Akane chuckled, and Ranma joined her, if a bit weakly.

"She writes me letters, you know," Ranma said after a few minutes. "I get maybe one a month or two."

"The amazons know where you live?" Akane asked in surprise. Ranma shook her head.

"They mail stuff for me to a guy in Hong Kong, who mails it to a forwarding service, which forwards it to a guy that owes me a favor..." she trailed off. "If they really wanted to find me they could, but I made it enough of a pain in the ass that they probably haven't bothered." Ranma thought for a while. "Tao Hua seems like a good girl. More like Cologne than her mother." Akane smiled.

"That's a good thing?" she asked wryly. Ranma shook her head.

"You've got no idea how many favors Cologne did us while she was in Nerima," Ranma said. "None of us had any idea, but we probably all owe her our lives." Akane's eyebrows rose.

"That bad?" she asked.

"I'll explain it to ya tonight," Ranma said. "I'm still sorting stuff out." Akane nodded, then elbowed Ranma.

"So, your daughter's named Towel?" she grinned. Ranma laughed and shook her head.

"Tao Hua honorable Amazon name!" Ranma parodied Shampoo again. "Name of father's grandmother. Is traditional for first warrior daughter to have father's grandmother's name." Akane laughed, and Ranma joined her. "She really wanted the name, and once she explained what it meant, I had to admit that it was a good name."

"What's it mean?" Akane asked.

"Blossom on the Way," Ranma said. "It's talking about Taoism. Shampoo's whole family practice, you know." Akane nodded.

"It is a beautiful name," she agreed. "Even if she sounds like she belongs in a bathroom." Ranma chuckled. Akane pointed at the picture frame. "May I?" she asked. Ranma hesitated for a moment, then handed it to her. Akane took a careful look at the photograph for the first time in full light. The girl had inherited her mother's hair, Ranma's grin and, almost aggravatingly, was showing clear signs of having inherited both of their figures. The picture showed the girl posed on one foot with her left arm outstretched in a Shaolin stance that Akane knew well, a Chinese longsword raised over her head with her right hand. Her form was perfect.

"She's going to be gorgeous when she grows up," Akane said.

"Yeah, most guys'll probably go nuts when they see her," Ranma agreed. "She'll probably give me a few heart attacks eventually."

"Most guys?" Akane asked, teasingly. Ranma shrugged.

"I was never really into the whole hourglass figure thing," Ranma said. "I know most guys are, but that kind of a body just aint practical for our kinda life. I've got no idea how Shampoo manages with her rack. I know mine sure hurt like hell when I go all out."

"Really?" Akane teased. "The macho Ranma Saotome sympathizes with the upper-back pains of the world's women?"

"Shaddap," Ranma grinned. More seriously, she continued, "That helps, sure, but I've always liked more..." she searched for the right word. "Streamlined girls."

"What, like mine?" Akane teased, posing. Ranma blushed a bit. Akane's teasing grin broke, and she cocked her head sideways. "Really?" she asked, surprised.

"Turn the frame over," Ranma said, and she did. The old photo of herself, faded and creased with age, startled her.

"Oh my gods," she breathed, and touched the glass of the frame lightly. She looked at Ranma, who had turned away to look at Daisetsu-san. "Really? You kept a picture of me all these years?" Ranma shrugged. Akane looked back at the picture of herself, speechless. "I don't know what to say," she finally managed. Ranma shifted her weight, and plopped down onto her rear.

"You don't have to say anything," Ranma said. Akane shifted her weight uncomfortably, and after a bit, Ranma plucked the picture out of her hand. "It was a long time ago, and a lot of stuff has changed since then. You're sure different."

"Is that a good or a bad thing?" Akane asked rhetorically. Ranma snorted.

"Both, I guess," Ranma replied. "It's nice not getting walloped all the time for crap you didn't do." Akane winced at this. "On the other hand, you're a lot calmer. It's like your fire's gone out. I kinda miss that."

"My fire...?" Akane said, surprised. Ranma smiled at her.

"That's what I really liked about you," she explained. "Maybe it's why I loved you, and not the other girls." She shrugged. Unseen, Akane's heart felt like it had stopped; after all this time, such a casual admission. Another, smaller part of her wailed at the past tense in the sentence. Oblivious to the effect her words had had, Ranma continued, "When you went after something,, you know, or when you really got it in your head to do something, there wasn't any way to stop you. You'd get this look in your eye, and I'd just know that you'd plow through mountains if you had to. It was exciting." Ranma thought for a bit. "Being around you was like throwing a hiryuu shoten ha. It's dangerous all around, and if you're not careful, you're gonna get blown away by your own move... but when you're standing there in the middle, with all the power swirlin' around you, it's exhilarating." Ranma thought again, then nodded. "Yeah, that's what livin' with you was like."

"I'm not sure whether to be flattered or offended," Akane replied, still turning Ranma's admission over in her mind. Ranma laughed.

"Gimme a break," she said. "I'm a dumb martial artist who lives on the side of a mountain. I compare you to what I know." Akane looked thoughtfully at Ranma for a time.

"You know, " she began, "last night I thought to myself that you were just like you had been when you were sixteen. I think... I think that I was wrong." Ranma met her gaze quizzically. "Sure, you're still brash, and a little rude, and when you find a mystery, you still dig at a it until you figure it out."

"Gee, thanks," Ranma panned. Akane elbowed her in the ribs.

"But you're also a lot quieter," Akane continued. "And you seem like you understand yourself a lot better. You're willing to take your time at something to do it right. You think about things before you do them, instead of just rushing in without a plan." Akane paused. "You're like the you I knew when we were kids, but moreso." Ranma thought about this, then shrugged. She reached over and picked up the water bottle that Akane had gave her the night before.

"I'm guessing that this is just normal water that's been through the kaisufuu," Ranma said, changing the subject. "And not nanniichuan water."

"Yep," Akane said, deciding not to fight the topic change. "If you want to get cured, feel free, but you're not getting the cure from me."

"Pervert," Ranma teased, and Akane laughed.

"C'mon, let's spar," she suggested. Ranma set down the photo and the bottle and began to stretch.

"No holding back this time," Ranma said, hopping down from the boulder.

"So we're fighting for real?" Akane asked, an eyebrow raised. Ranma noted with surprise, and no small amount of anticipation, that Akane didn't seem the least intimidated by the crushing defeats that she'd suffered at Ranma's hands in the previous week.

"Normal sparring rules," Ranma said, with a little reluctance. "No special techniques, but no pretending to suck either."

"Fair enough," Akane grinned. She took what looked like a beginner's kung fu stance, except for the fact that her footing was a bit off. Ranma settled into her easy stance a few meters away and waited for Akane's opening rush. It didn't come.

"Whatcha waiting for?" Ranma teased.

"You," Akane returned. Ranma smiled and obliged her, darting forward along a ragged trajectory. To her surprise, Akane didn't seem to react at all, and simply watched as Ranma advanced. Ranma opened with a foot stomp, which landed heavily on Akane's unmoving left foot, and followed it with a solid punch to Akane's shoulder. The plan, thereafter, was to fade backwards and down, avoiding any response that Akane could make.

The plan, as it turned out, wouldn't work. As Ranma's punch landed, Akane's right fist slammed into Ranma's lower ribcage with a terrible ferocity. The force of the punch, which Akane had started before Ranma had even been within her range, lifted Ranma off of her feet and sent her spinning through the air to land heavily a meter away. When she landed, Ranma rolled desperately away, and managed to come to her feet just in time to bobble unsteadily over the low foot sweep that Akane launched after her. Ranma rolled again, and used her crouch to spring skyward. Akane, knowing that airborne fighting was Ranma's specialty, let the redhead retreat.

"C'mon, Ranma, is a little karate too much for you to handle?" Akane taunted. Ranma landed lightly and winced in pain. Akane had hit her _hard_, harder than Ranma could remember being hit for a very long time. Worse, the blows that Ranma had landed didn't seem to have affected Akane in any obvious way.

Akane took her strange stance again, and this time Ranma saw it for the trap it was. The hand positions were designed to look like a basic bow-and-arrow kung fu stance, one arm forward and the other cocked back, but the wide footwork was really a widened karate kokutsu-dachi stance. It was exceptionally immobile, having neither the mobility that a proper bow-and-arrow stance would represent or the defensive options of a proper kokutsu-dachi. Someone taking this stance would certainly be hit by any attack launched at them, but the way that Akane managed her weight in the stance meant that a properly timed punch or power kick would carry tremendous force. She was, Ranma realized, counting on the fact that Ranma was both faster and more agile than she was, and that the redhead couldn't strike as hard as Akane could. It wasn't a bad gamble.

Ranma bought another moment's thought by pretending that her ribs hurt more than they did. By fighting defensively, Akane could see what form Ranma's attacks would have to take, and would be able to launch a counterattack based thereupon before any blows had been exchanged.

Again, Ranma sped forward, and again Akane watched her advance carefully. This time, Ranma opened with a backward-spinning elbow strike. Moments before it would have connected, Ranma dove downward, trusting her instincts as she turned the attack into a low leg sweep. Her gamble was rewarded when she felt the fabric of Akane's pant leg flutter past, the leg that drove it just centimeters above her head. Ranma's foot sweep connected and Akane, already overbalanced from her missed power kick, was sent airborne.

Before Akane could land, Ranma continued her rotation and pushed against the ground with all of her might. Ranma's second kick struck Akane's lower back, launching her directly upward. Ranma took a second to recover her balance, then leapt after.

Meanwhile, Akane was trying desperately to gain control of her spinning, airborne body. With what seemed like a series of panicked, random arm sweeps, she stopped her spinning, and was well on her way to righting herself when Ranma caught up to her. One flipping double-foot kick later, and Akane was sent crashing to the ground. Ranma landed lightly a meter away.

"I like that stance," Ranma complimented her as Akane pushed herself to her feet. "It's a great counter for a soft-form user who's faster than you are."

"Thanks," Akane winced. "Crap, I should've seen that leg sweep coming. I haven't been practicing my basics enough."

"Not your fault that I'm too fast for ya," Ranma said.

"I'm pretty fast too, you know," Akane said.

"Not as fast as I am," Ranma countered. Akane didn't argue the point. "Another round?" Ranma asked.

"Nah, let's do kata," Akane said, and took the beginning stance of a kempo-based Anything-Goes series. "I can't beat you if you're not going to let me use special techniques."

"You still think that you can beat me at all?" Ranma asked, taking up the partner stance. Akane just grinned, and began the kata.

* * *

The workout, Ranma decided, had helped. She'd never been very good at sorting through her problems mentally, and the formal perfection that the several kata that she and Akane had worked through had demanded her entire focus. It had been nice, even if the practice hadn't resolved anything. She'd left Akane to work on the morisenken afterward.

This afternoon, Ranma was working her way through her dry field, which she farmed mostly for pickling greens. She'd long ago turned all of the stones out of the field, but the soft, well-cared for dirt that was so rich for her crops was also fertile ground for weeds. The endless weeding, tilling, and care that her crops demanded helped to break the monotony that she would otherwise have been engulfed in. Ranma smirked; she could just imagine her father's furious roar were he to discover that the great martial artist that he'd raised was reduced to endless, menial weeding, although she didn't exactly love the chore herself. Her smirk faltered. There was something in that thought that bothered Ranma, but she wasn't sure what it was. She pushed it away, for consideration later.

Akane was, if Ranma were completely honest with herself, her real problem. Some random guy barging in on her home had been bad enough, but finding out that he'd been Akane had well and truly shattered Ranma's solitude. Even after her story the previous night, her mere presence begged a host of questions that Ranma wasn't sure she wanted an answer to—and not just questions about Akane.

Ranma dug out a weed. How did she feel about the black-haired girl? She wasn't sure. Ranma thought for a while. She'd kept Akane's photo all these years. Certainly, that meant something. She'd left Nerima because of Akane too—it had been as if nothing else mattered after she'd rejected him. That definitely meant something.

Sadly, Ranma straightened up and sighed. She knew what she was doing. She was trying to convince herself of something that she knew, deep down, she didn't feel anymore, and that by itself was a crystal clear answer to her question.

At least, she resolved, there was one decision that it was past time she made. Ranma walked toward her house where, on a cinderblock next to the front door, she'd left the water bottle that Akane had given her.

* * *

When Akane entered Ranma's house hour later and covered in sweat, she was stunned to see Ranma in his male body. His shoulders, she observed idly, seemed broader than she remembered, and he still had a full head of hair. That was nice. He was standing in the kitchen, slicing some pickled and fresh greens for what looked like it would become a stir fry. Perhaps worse than all the rest, Ranma had decided to cook shirtless, and his sculpted torso was still glistening from what appeared to be a recent bath.

"Hey," he called out, glancing over.

"You changed back," Akane said. Ranma shrugged.

"You figured out the trick," he said. "Sooner or later, someone else will. No sense in wearing a disguise once you've been found out." He stretched, arching his back. "Damn, I forgot how nice it is to be able to reach everything." He laughed, and Akane joined him.

"And go around without a shirt, I guess," Akane added, hoping that her nervousness didn't creep into her voice.

"It's the little things, you know?" Ranma grinned. "Gods, I'm glad I'm a guy." There was a lull as Akane tried to formulate a response that wasn't an agreement.

"I'm going to go take a bath," she said eventually. "I've been working out all day, and I stink."

"I was wondering what that was," Ranma teased, and Akane threw a sweaty towel at him. He laughed, and Akane slipped into the bath before Ranma could throw the towel back at her.

With the door safely closed behind her, Akane leaned against the wall, her eyes wide, and exhaled heavily. Ranma had largely behaved himself after that first night in the hot spring, and even though Akane remembered how casually sexy Ranma could be, she'd forgotten the sheer degree to which she had been attracted to him. In many ways, it was worse now. Ranma had been a strong, well-built young man, but he'd managed to grow up, while hidden in a woman's body, into a sculpted Adonis of a man; the thin bits here and there had filled out, the muscled areas had evened out, and his young face had acquired a bit of age and weathering. That weathering had helped bring his girl side's almost unearthly beauty back down to reality, but it accented his male face in a way that defied her description.

Akane's libido reminded her rather forcefully that she'd slept alone for far, far too long so far as it was concerned. Even as she did her best to suppress the instinct, Akane realized that she was in an awful lot of trouble.

* * *

"Took you long enough," Ranma said when Akane eventually emerged from the bathroom. He was eating a bowl of stir fry, still shirtless, at the kitchen table. A second, with chopsticks and a cup of tea, had been laid out for Akane. She padded over to the table, grateful for a set of clean clothes and the fact that she could excuse her blush, if need be, on the hot spring. She sat down, toweled her short hair one last time, and set to eating. The stir fry was good, if vegetarian; Akane preferred shrimp, but knew very well that it was both expensive and quite perishable, a combination that made it an unlikely prospect in an unelectrified farmhouse.

"So," Ranma began after a few minutes worth of quiet eating. "I promised you the whole story about me and Shampoo." Akane stopped eating, looked at Ranma, then nodded. "Well, I've been thinkin' about how to tell you all day, and I realized something this afternoon. It kinda matters..." he paused, searching for the right words. "How we feel about each other." Akane set her bowl down, eyebrows raised. "Gah, that came out wrong," Ranma grumbled. He thought for a moment. "Ok, so it's like this. You told me yesterday that you used to love me, back when I lived in Nerima, right? Well, I told you today that I did too. That's nice and all, but what really matters is, umm..." Ranma hesitated. "Now," he finished. Akane blinked and tried to sort out what he'd said for a bit before she responded.

"You mean that you want to tell the story differently depending on how we feel?" she asked.

"Yeah," Ranma nodded. "I mean, last time, hearing this really kinda hurt ya. I don't want to pull open a bad scab if you're still sweet on me." Akane ate a few bites of stir fry to give herself a few seconds' thinking time.

"Well," she began, "it'd help if you put a shirt on."

"Huh?" Ranma looked at himself in surprise. His torso had dried, but it still rippled distractingly when he moved.

"Dummy," Akane said, and tossed an edamame bean at him with her chopsticks. "You don't even realize how you look, do you?" Ranma grinned sheepishly, then got up and walked over to his room. Akane set her stir fry down and thought furiously for a few minutes, until Ranma re-emerged from his room, wearing a tight tank top—still distracting, but worlds better than he had been.

"Sorry," he apologized. "Everything I've got's sized for my girl form. I can change if you want."

"It's okay," Akane said. Ranma sat back down.

"So..." he said expectantly. Akane still didn't have an answer.

"Could you go first?" she asked. Ranma nodded.

"All right," he said after a slight hesitation. "I used to love you, way back when, like I said earlier. You were everything... well, I think you'll understand that after the story. Anyway, I left 'cuz you didn't want me around, and if you didn't want me around, I didn't want to be around. So I went and got myself locked and set up shop up here. Time passed." He shrugged. "And one day, a few years ago, I realized that I hadn't looked at your picture in about a year. It was kinda weird, 'cuz I used to spend days staring at it when I first got here. The weirder part is that I wasn't sad or upset about it either. I was... wistful." He tried out the word, then nodded. "Yeah, wistful's good. It was like remembering the good old days, you know, not some terrible mistake anymore." Ranma thought for a minute before continuing.

"Now..." he paused and thought some more. "Now you're here, and you're so different. I guess you grew up. You sure wear the years well," he complimented her, and Akane almost dropped her tea in surprise. "It's not like you look younger than you are. It's like the you I used to know was kinda waiting to become the you you are now." There was a pause after this, one that seemed to stretch for far longer than it could possibly have.

"I think that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me," Akane said, and smiled. Ranma tugged on his pigtail sheepishly and looked away, his face clouding a bit.

"That's all true, but you're not the girl I fell in love with," he said. There was a brief pause after, which could have lasted no more than a second or two, but the words seemed to sit between the two like boulders, warping the world around them. "You're older, calmer, less self-conscious. You grew into yourself, I guess, but when you did, the fire went out. I said earlier that that fire was what I first fell in love with, and I think I was right when I did." He sighed sadly. "And I grew up too. You're makin' me face that, and I'm really not liking what I'm seeing. It turns out that I'm the sorta guy that runs from his problems instead of facing 'em. I grew up into Pop." He paused here, face dark. "I'm not really happy about that."

"So, the way I figure it," he said, "you're named Akane Tendo, and I'm named Ranma Saotome, but neither one of us is the person that the other fell in love with fifteen years ago." He snorted. "Fifteen years. It's a damn lifetime." For a long time, Akane said nothing, considering what had been said. Ranma had begun to fidget uncomfortably when she finally spoke.

"I think you're right," she said, and meant it, even though the words tore at her soul. "I still feel tied up in you—the you that you were, and still in some ways are... but you're right that I'm not the girl that I was, and that you're not the boy that you were. I want to love you..." she trailed off, and a tear rolled down her cheek. "But I think that that means that I don't. I'm in love with the idea of you, and seeing you today, being yourself, reminded me just how far away my ideas about you can be from reality." Akane sniffled, and did her best to hold back her tears.

"I kept telling myself that I was just looking for you in order to find inner peace," she continued. "But I'm starting to see now that I was lying to myself. I was looking for you because I still feel empty inside, in that same spot that I've always felt empty, even before you came. You filled that up, for a little while, and it made be feel so good, so happy," she paused here and let off a choked laugh, "even when you were being a world-class asshole." Ranma's face was twisted in on itself, regret written on it as clearly as if it had been scrawled there in ink.

"Akane, we don't hafta do this," he attempted, but Akane shook her head violently.

"No, it's all right," she said. "Shodai-sensei said that in looking for peace, I might find understanding instead. I didn't really see the difference then, but I do now. I thought that I needed inner peace in order to move on, and while that'd be nice, all I really need is to understand myself." She sniffled. "And I think that I'm finally starting to do that." For the first time in over a decade—indeed, for the first time since Ranma had left Nerima so many years ago, Akane, one of the world's most capable martial artists, broke down and bawled like she had when she was a girl. After a bit, Ranma scooted over to her and held the woman without too much awkwardness as sobs of disillusionment wracked her body.

She cried until there were no tears left, until it felt like the lonely hole inside her had swallowed her entire being and until, finally, the hole stopped hurting and simply was. Its presence was no less sad or regrettable, but it no longer dragged her forward, and the aching need that it had always filled her with finally abated. It was like peace, Akane reflected as she came back to herself, only not. It was, she realized, understanding, as her old teacher and friend had predicted. None of her problems had been solved, but Akane finally felt as though they were things that, like anything else, could be worked, shaped, bent, twisted, or even broken if she needed to. She took a deep breath, and realized that Ranma was still holding her.

"Thanks," she said, and smiled at him. "I needed that."

"You want to wait for tomorrow on the Shampoo thing?" Ranma asked, releasing her.

"No," Akane shook her head. "For the first time, I think I'm really better." Ranma studied her for a while, then nodded slowly. He scooted back, thought for a few moments, and began his tale.

--A/N--

Well, I was thinking that I might get to the flashback part of the story in this chapter, but as I started to write it, I realized that Ranma and Akane's confrontation the previous night had raised quite a few more issues than I had dealt with, and it didn't feel right to push forward through them. I really do believe that the canon Ranma and Akane (and, indeed, almost all of the main-line R ½ characters) are really complex characters. The big question that had been raised, and that I didn't think that either Ranma or Akane would want to put off dealing with after all this time, was how they felt about each other. I hope you guys don't mind another dialogue-heavy chapter; on the other hand, if y'all haven't realized yet that I'm very much a character-centric sort of writer by this point, I don't know how the heck I'm gonna bludgeon it into your thick skulls.

The next chapter will, in the form of a flashback, tell the story of how Ranma came to sleep with Shampoo, how Mousse found out, and how it came to pass that Ranma left Nerima—and, in particular, what Tao Hua has to do with everything. There are, at this point, several fairly big clues out there, and most of you should probably be able to make fairly accurate guesses at this point. Nevertheless, I also hope to surprise you in some ways.

Finally, thanks for the feedback and for just reading this. Over 3000 unique visitors... that's pretty awesome. Thanks.

--Translations--

Kokutsu-dachi- Back Long Stance. One of the most basic and effective defensive stances in karate. There's a good diagram of the foot positioning on Wikipedia, but if you read Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, just check out Toji's stance. He uses kokutsu-dachi almost exclusively.


	6. The Disaster

Disclaimer: I don't own any of this.

Disclaimer part 2: There is completely non-graphic sex in this chapter. It is not a lemon, or a lime, and is certainly no worse than anything you'd get in a middle school health class, but be forewarned. If you've ever laughed at a dirty joke, you'll be fine.

The Lady of the Mountain

by: Flashfyre5

Chapter 6: The Disaster

The letter, when it arrived, really should have alarmed Ranma. It had been two weeks since his abortive wedding to Akane and three and a half since the two of them had returned from China. Things had been quiet since the wedding—quiet in a way that simply had never been the case in Nerima. Ukyou had stayed home from school. Shampoo hadn't been seen outside of the Nekohanten. Nobody had heard word one from the entire Kuno clan. The letter, then, should have been regarded as the equivalent of high-explosive, undetonated ordinance, rather than with a mixture of cautious confusion, as it had been. It read as follows:

* * *

Son in Law,

I am certain that you will agree with me when I say that the current state of affairs has persisted for far too long. Your marriage to my great-granddaughter has represented a problem to yourself, to myself, to her, and to, at the very least, three other young women in the area. I would like to meet with you this afternoon to discuss a permanent resolution to our shared problem.

You have my word of honor that, if you come, you will not be drugged, kidnapped, ensorcelled, or otherwise harmed during or immediately after the meeting, and that this promise of protection will extend to cover all those you hold dear during that same period of time. In return, I ask that you come alone. We have things to discuss that many, ourselves included, will, frankly, not like. I'm sure that you know very well how chaos tends to balloon around here as more people involve themselves in a situation.

Thank you for your discretion,

Khu Lon

* * *

"So, waddya make of it?" Ranma asked, handing the letter across the kichen table to Nabiki. The two of them, as well as the entire Tendo clan plus Ranma's father. The letter had appeared overnight, tacked to the front door of the Tendo residence. Nabiki took the letter, read it, then held her hand out again. Ranma grimaced, then pressed a pair of five-hundred yen coins into it. She read the letter again.

"Do you want the long version or the short version?" Nabiki asked. Ranma shrugged. "Well, I don't exactly like it, but I think you're safe if you go." Ranma's face screwed up with doubt.

"I dunno," he said. "It kinda sounds like she's being twisty. Like she's trying to hide what she's really planning to do in the stuff she's promisin' to not do."

"I think so too," Akane agreed. Nabiki shook her head.

"Look, how does Cologne usually do things once she's made up her mind about something?" Nabiki asked. Ranma blinked in surprise.

"I dunno. She's pretty sneaky," Ranma guessed.

"Too true," Genma agreed around a mouthful of rice. Nabiki signed dramatically.

"The full-body cat's tongue," she began, ticking off fingers, "Ryouga and the bakusai tenketsu, you and the hiryuu shoten ha... I could go on," she smirked. "Ranma, when Cologne decides to do something, she just _does_ it. She doesn't pussyfoot around, and she definitely doesn't write letters. This," she waved the letter in question, "is way off base. That means one of two things. One, she didn't actually write it, and she'll tell you so as soon as you poke your head into the Nekohanten. That would be really stupid, because then whoever _did_ write this letter would have just pissed off not one, but two of the best martial artists in town. Option two is that she means business, and that she wrote the letter to try to tell us that." Nabiki snatched up a rice ball and rose from the table. "But that's just my thousand yen's worth. See you at school," she said, and left.

"I dunno," Ranma grumbled, looking again at the letter. "Still seems fishy to me."

"Too true," Genma said again, this time around a mouthful of Ranma's rice. Ranma finally noticed the culinary thievery, and breakfast quickly devolved into a brawl.

Several hours, a fight with Akane about the letter, a ki drain from Hinako as a result of that fight, a hesitant greeting when Ukyou'd finally returned to school, and another fight with Akane about his greeting of Ukyou later, Ranma stood across the street from the Nekohanten, uncertain. The noodle shop was closed, the windows shuttered. He could see a light on in Shampoo's window, on the second-story living area. Mousse's room was dark, as was Cologne's.

"Damn, this is a really bad idea," Ranma said to himself, and crossed the street. He'd been about a half-second away from asking Ukyou if he could borrow Konatsu as backup, but had decided against it. For one, Akane would throw a fit if he talked to Ukyou again today. He grimaced. Akane still seemed pretty messed up over the failed wedding. Yet another reason why this was a really bad idea. He shook his head.

The second reason that Ranma had decided against getting some backup was because he was certain that Cologne would know if he had, even given Konatsu's incredible ability to hide himself. If Nabiki was right, and Cologne was being honest here, a move like that would probably end badly. Mustering a final bit of resolve, Ranma knocked on the door of the Nekohanten.

"The door is not locked, Son-in-law," Cologne's voice called out almost immediately from inside. Ranma pushed open the door. Inside, Cologne sat alone at a round table in the middle of the room; on a normally busy day, it would have seated four diners. The cafe seemed soulless and empty without its usual hustle and bustle; even the glorious aromas of cooking food that had always permeated the building were gone. Ranma had gotten used to those smells when he'd worked there, months ago, hoping for a chance at the phoenix pill. He closed the door behind him.

"Lock it, please. I do not wish to be disturbed," Cologne requested. Ranma hesitated, then complied. Cologne pulled out her long pipe and lit it. "Please, have a seat," she gestured to the chair across from her.

"You sent this?" Ranma asked, holding up the folded letter. Cologne nodded. Ranma looked at the chair that Cologne had pointed at, then inspected its underside, and finally swapped it for another nearby chair, which he inspected as well. Cologne sighed deeply.

"I must say that it saddens me greatly to see how little you trust my word," she said, and blew out a smoke ring. Ranma sat on his chosen chair cautiously, and when it didn't attempt to ensnare him, relaxed just a bit.

"Well, you haven't exactly given me a lot of reason to trust ya," Ranma said. Cologne's eyes narrowed.

"I have never once lied to you, and my advice has saved your life or your manhood more than once." she said sharply. "Have you forgotten the Musk? Or Happosai's moxibuxtion?"

"Well, you aint always up front either," Ranma countered. "Remember the fake phoenix pill? How about the reversal jewel crap?" Cologne matched Ranma's glare for a few moments, then took another puff from her pipe.

"I suppose that's fair," Cologne admitted. "I wish to be completely candid with you today, Son-in-law. If I am to do this, however, you must trust me, at least a little." She paused. "If it is of any comfort to you, I swear on the lives of my entire clan that I will neither lie to you nor misdirect you today. I would swear on the lives of the entire Amazon tribe, but I do not have the authority to make such an oath." Ranma regarded her evenly for a few minutes before nodding slowly.

"Why the change?" he asked. Cologne cocked an eyebrow. "First a letter to me, now you're taking a pretty serious oath to tell the truth. This aint like you."

"Perceptive, for once," Cologne smiled. "Perhaps there's hope for you yet." She reached inside her robe and withdrew a piece of paper, then tossed it across the table to Ranma. He opened it, and found the page covered in tiny, condensed Chinese script. Part of the back, he found, had been consumed by the missive as well. "I don't suppose that you've learned to read Mandarin yet, have you?" Ranma shook his head. "No, I didn't think so. I will summarize it, then."

"That is a formal letter of command from the council of elders," Cologne said. "It observes that I've been here, away from the tribe and pursuing you, for just over a year now, with no sign that you're any closer to returning with Shampoo than you were when I first arrived. It further notes your recent, and rather spectacular, I might add, defeat of Saffron." Cologne paused, and let the weight of the statement sink in. "In short, that letter is demanding that I stop fooling about and retrieve you. My people want you, Ranma, and they'll stop at nothing to get you, now that they know how powerful you've become."

"Whoa, I thought that this was about settling things between me and Shampoo," Ranma said, rising.

"It is," Cologne said, and gestured at the chair. "Sit down, Son-in-law. I regret the arrival of that letter as much as you do." She puffed on her pipe thoughtfully for a minute, and Ranma eventually sat. "Tell me, how much money have you paid that mercenary Nabiki to comb through our laws in search of a loophole by which you can escape your marriage to Shampoo?"

"Fifteen thousand," Ranma admitted after a few seconds of surprised hesitation.

"And she has found nothing?" Cologne asked. Ranma shook his head. "That is because there is no loophole, or escape clause, or any such nonsense. The law is designed to bring outsiders into the tribe by force. It was first put in place to take husbands from the marauding Hun two thousand years ago. It's _meant_ to be inescapable. By bringing in such mighty bloodlines, we strengthened ourselves to the point where we could resist Saffron, even in his full splendor." She paused for a minute, and shook her head.

"And now," she continued, "we must remain strong enough that the politicians in Beijing will continue to believe that sacrificing a large army in order to subdue a single, small village in the mountains of the far outskirts of their nation is not worth their time or treasure. We need, in short, the blood of champions now, more than ever." Ranma shifted uncomfortably. Cologne let the silence stretch.

"Look, I aint interested in bein' Shampoo's husband, and I aint interested in bein' an Amazon," Ranma said eventually.

"You had best become interested, Son-in-law, or this conversation is moot," Cologne said harshly. "I may think the demands of my... colleagues at home are monumentally stupid, and that they arise because they don't understand you in the least, either as a person or as a warrior, but I am bound by honor to respect and enact the will of the council of elders." This, at least, Ranma could understand some. He calmed a bit. Cologne hopped onto the table and walked to within arm's reach of him.

"Son-in-law, do you think that I could defeat Saffron on my own, as you did?" she asked. Ranma thought about the question before answering.

"No," he said, and Cologne nodded in agreement.

"Why not?" she asked.

'Well, your fighting style's all about disablin' and immobilizing," Ranma said. "But Saffron aint the type to give a crap about that. If you paralyzed his arm, he'd rip it off, grow a new one, and use the old one to club ya."

"You are correct," Cologne agreed, then leaned in. "Now, more importantly, could _you_ defeat me, as you did Saffron?" Ranma stiffened.

"Hey, Ranma Saotome don't lose to anyone!" he declared, and pumped his arm. Cologne bopped him lightly on the head with her staff.

"Enough bluster, Son-in-law. You and I are the only ones here," she said. Ranma deflated.

"Not yet," he admitted.

"Why not?" Cologne asked.

"'Cuz those same pressure points and crap work just fine on me, and you can beat my best technique," Ranma said. "I've gotta beat the crap outta you to win, right? Well, one touch from you in the right spot and I lose an arm or a leg for the fight. After that, I won't be able to keep ya from getting another arm or something, and then it's really over."

"Correct," Cologne agreed, and walked back away across the table. "And I am more grateful than you can imagine that you are at least self-aware enough to know that."

"Hey!" Ranma protested. Cologne stopped and half-glared back at him, over her shoulder.

"Son-in-law, do you have the faintest idea of what would happen were you to find some way of ridding yourself of Shampoo and myself?" she asked softly.

"Well," he said thoughtfully. "I'd hafta find some way of settling things with Ucchan for one. Kodachi..." He shuddered. "I dunno about Kodachi. Been trying to do something about her for over a year. Nothing sticks." He would have continued, but Cologne's soft laughter interrupted him. She shook her head and turned to face Ranma fully.

"Son-in-law, you've lived near us for a year now," Cologne said. "Based on your time with us, how would you describe my people?" Ranma considered the question.

"Strong," he began, and thought some more. "Real strong," he revised, and nodded. "Smart." He paused, then added, "Determined." Cologne nodded, then fixed her eyes on his.

"And based on that, do you really think that my people would let the matter rest if you could simply overcome Shampoo and myself?" she asked, and the question hung in the air between them for a long minute. "It may not seem it, Son-in-law, but I am known as something of a radical reformer among my people. I've spent my life attempting to bring Amazon custom more into a state of... compatibility with the rest of the world. For one, I've championed enormous reforms in men's rights." Ranma snorted in disbelief.

"Yeah, right," he said. "I've seen the way you treat Mousse." Cologne shook her head.

"Only a generation ago that fool would have been castrated for his senseless pursuit of an honored warrior maiden," Cologne returned, and Ranma's blood froze. "Many elders of our village would still exercise their right to do so under the old law today." She sighed and shook her head.

"To return to my previous point, were Shampoo and I to vanish," Cologne continued, "another elder would be tapped to return you to the village. She would doubtlessly bring a team of blooded warriors with her and some of our... more aggressive artifacts." Cologne fixed Ranma with her gaze again. "Make no mistake, Son-in-law—as good as I am, there are better in my village, and magical relics of truly horrific potential."

"But..." Ranma floundered. "Without Shampoo, what's the point? I mean, I'm supposed to be her husband, right? If she's not there, no dice, right?"

"Right... to an extent," Cologne agreed. "Remember, our laws exist to bring new blood into the tribe. Once a warrior's value has been demonstrated, the tribe will stop at nothing to bring him into the fold. If his wife falls in her attempt to retrieve him, then the first warrior that he defeats will become his new wife, and the pursuit will continue until he is captured." Cologne was silent for a moment, and Ranma blinked, stunned and gaping like a fish.

"I think you finally begin to understand your predicament," Cologne said, and sat in her chair again.

"So..." Ranma began slowly. "Level with me. What's the plan?"

"The plan is simple," Cologne replied. "I first ask you, for one last time, if you will voluntarily return to my tribe as Shampoo's husband." Ranma was silent for a long time. Before he answered, he tensed visibly and swallowed hard.

"No," he said. Cologne nodded.

"In that event, the letter that I showed you directed me to use one of the more powerful magical relics at my disposal," Cologne continued. "The first possibility is the Collar of Submission." She pulled a plain, battered bronze torque from her robe and set it on the table. "Any command given to one wearing it must be followed as completely as possible. Once given, a command can never be removed, even if it contradicts another, previous command. For instance, if I were to command you to be a good Amazon husband to Shampoo, and another commanded you to hate her, you would spend your life performing husbandly duties as you loathed my great-granddaughter." She paused. "And any commands implanted by the Collar remain even after it has been removed. In short, were I to force this onto you, I could make you do anything, and there is nothing that anyone in the world could to to change you back." Ranma stared at the collar in abject horror. Cologne reached back into her robes.

"My second option is the idol of Boukyaku," she said, and placed a shapeless, twisted black rock on the table. Ranma could feel its evil from where he sat, and shied back. "In this idol resides a terrible spirit of oblivion, known as Boukyaku. We use it to punish the worst offenders amongst our people. If the target of Boukyaku's hunger does not submit to Amazon will, it will consume that person's soul utterly." Cologne reached back into her robes.

"My third option is a spell of banishment." This time, an old, yellowed paper scroll was placed on the table, a vial of something dark and viscous next to it. "This spell would banish whomsoever it was cast on to the kami realm forever, and erase all memory and trace of that person from the mortal realm." Cologne paused here, visibly uncomfortable. "I would be obliged to cast this spell on Akane, were I to cast it." Ranma's expression hardened.

"I'd kill you," he said, his voice a whisper. Cologne laughed mirthlessly.

"Weren't you listening, boy?" she asked. "The spell would erase the very memory of Akane from your mind. A day after the spell was cast, she would be nothing more than a faint memory, like a dream. A week afterward and neither you nor anyone else in this world would ever know that she had ever existed." Cologne shook her head. "But you, as you are here and now, is the reason why I will use none of these three options, if I must indeed bring you to heel by force." Ranma, still defensive, raised a questioning eyebrow.

"Were I to draw you to the village by force or coercion," Cologne explained, "You would spend your life looking for a way, an opportunity, to somehow free yourself or to avenge yourself on us. I have no doubt that you would eventually succeed., and I will not put my people into that risk, even for you." Her face darkened. "If I must take you against your will, Son-in-law, it will be by the most terrible means that I know." She took a deep breath before continuing.

"There is a spell," she said slowly, "that, once cast, will utterly crush a subject's mind. It would reduce even the most strong-willed, enlightened man to nothing more than a mindless, living drone. If it were cast on the living Buddha, he would be defeated. No force on heaven or Earth can reverse the effect of this spell, once cast, or to rebuild any of the mind that it has crushed." She was silent for a moment, and allowed the impact of her words to strike home. "I would—will—use this spell on you, Son-in-law, if I have to. It will exact a terrible price on my soul, one that I will pay for the next hundred lifetimes, but it is a price that I will cheerfully pay to ensure my people's safety. You," she looked directly at Ranma again, "would be nothing more than a breeding stud for the widowed warrior women to use if they wished to have a child." There was silence in the restaurant for a long time after this.

"Why are you telling me this?" Ranma finally asked.

"Because I like you, Son-in-law," Cologne replied. "And I admire you. You are a talent that appears once in a generation, if that generation is exceptionally fortunate. We nave not had an opportunity to take a warrior of your caliber at breeding age for over a century." She paused, and smiled. "But you are also something much more rare than that. You are a genuinely decent human being, and you have fought selflessly for, I believe, every person who's ever tried to kill you, Saffron aside. I've never met anyone else like you, and I think that you deserve better than this," she swept her arm above the items laid out on the table before her. Ranma thought for a time.

"So, what now?" he asked.

"Now, I give you a third choice," Cologne said. "One that is still unpalatable, but will leave you a free man if you take it." Ranma's eyebrows shot up. "An elder can grant a divorce to any Amazon couple at the request of either party, provided a few preconditions have been met. I am prepared to grant you such a divorce, if you are willing to meet those preconditions."

"What are they?" Ranma asked.

"The first is that, as you are a man, your wife must agree," Cologne explained. "I've spent the last two weeks working at it, but I've gotten my great-granddaughter to agree to the terms of your divorce. She can see that you love Akane as clearly as anyone else."

"I don't love that uncute tomboy!" Ranma exclaimed, and leapt from his chair. He looked around wildly for recording devices of some kind or another, or perhaps a surprise wedding ceremony.

"Be silent, Son-in-law," Cologne commanded. "We haven't much time." Ranma sat down, cautiously. "The second precondition of your divorce is that you must acknowledge that you are an Amazon before me—only an Amazon may petition an elder for a divorce. You don't need to live in the village, but if we call to you for help, you must come as quickly as you possibly can. You must live by our laws as well, though if there are no other Amazons around, nobody will question your honor if you were to... ignore those you find inconvenient. Many of our warriors do, when they travel alone." Ranma considered this.

"I can live with that," he agreed. Cologne closed here eyes.

"The third..." she said reluctantly. "The third precondition that you must meet is that you must have produced a child in your marriage." Ranma sat, stunned, for a minute.

"_What_?" he howled. Ranma slowly stood, hands gripping the table powerfully enough to splinter the wood.

"I'm well aware that you're not interested in laying with my great-granddaughter," Cologne said, attempting to mollify the irate martial artist across from her. "Please, _Ranma_, consider your alternatives here," she asked, and the use of his name shocked some of the anger out of Ranma. He didn't say anything for the moment, so Cologne used the opportunity to continue.

"The bloodline is everything, and it is not unheard-of for an elder to offer this option in politically delicate situations," Cologne explained. "Both Shampoo and I will suffer a considerable loss of face when we return, but the pursuit will be ended! The matter will be considered closed. I can pretend to have received the letter a day after you agreed to this option, and will have sworn on my honor that you would have your divorce. The others will not be able to fight it." Ranma remained silent.

"I'd have to sleep with her?" he finally asked.

"Only once," Cologne said. "Before you arrived, she drank a potion. It is known as the Little Champion Draught. If a man lays with her within the next four hours, she will be come pregnant with a daughter without fail. If you go to her in the next four hours, your divorce will be finalized on the day that the child is born. If you do not, I will not be able to replicate the potion for several months... and I will have to resort to other measures. She is upstairs, in her room, waiting for you now. Afterward, we will leave for home, and never return. No-one outside this room need ever know." Ranma stood still for a few minutes, then sat slowly. Cologne gathered her relics and walked into the kitchen, leaving Ranma alone to think. After a little over forty minutes of silent thought, he rose and, without a word, walked to the stairs up to the living area on the second floor.

The next half-hour was a strange blur for Ranma. Shampoo was, indeed, waiting for him in her room, naked. Tears streamed down her puffy, reddened face, and they redoubled when Ranma opened the door to her room. Ranma didn't say anything to her. He didn't have anything to say. The act itself was ragged and horrible for both; Shampoo couldn't bear to look at him and sobbed the whole time. Ranma, feeling rotten about what he was doing even as he saw the necessity of it, joined her after a while. In their mutual misery, somehow, neither of them noticed that Shampoo had neglected to draw the curtains of her window. It shouldn't have mattered; only someone on a level with the window and looking through it at an angle could have possibly seen Shampoo's bed.

The only thing that Ranma remembered clearly from the whole experience was looking up at the end of the affair and seeing, through the window, a white-feathered duck standing on the exterior windowsill of Shampoo's window, huge, thick glasses balanced on its opened-in-shock beak. Before Ranma could do anything, the duck vanished into the open air, winging its way swiftly away from the Nekohanten.

Afterward, Ranma dressed himself and left the Nekohanten as quickly as he could. He ran as quickly as he could toward the Tendo dojo, but he knew as he ran that he was already far, far too late. Even if Mousse hadn't arrived there before him, some version of the truth of what had happened between him and Shampoo would be known. His gut clenched at the thought.

Ranma paused. The Tendo dojo, where he'd lived for over a year—the longest single home he could ever remember having—loomed in front of him like a tomb, and for all the haste that he'd managed in coming to it, the sight of the building itself and the thought of what lay within brought him up short. He crouched on the rooftop across the street from the front entrance to the beautiful old building and tried to think, but his efforts were frustrated by two images: Shampoo's weeping, tearful face, and the mirror if it that he couldn't stop imagining with Akane's features. After a few minutes of unbearable indecision, Ranma leaned forward, just a bit, but enough to force himself to fall from the rooftop. He landed lightly on the street, his choice made.

The house, when he opened the front door, was utterly silent. At this time of day, Genma and Soun were usually playing a game of either shogi or go, the quiet ticks of the tiles punctuating their soft conversation. Kasumi ought to be cooking dinner by now. At the very least, Nabiki's music should be wafting down the stairs from her room. Instead, there was nothing, and for the first time, Ranma was certain that he'd made a terrible mistake.

"I'm home," Ranma called out, and there was no reply. He slipped his soft-soled shoes off and padded into the house. The kitchen, when checked, was empty, but vegetables and a partially-dismembered fish had been set out on a pair of cutting boards. Kasumi had left a burner on; either she'd been kidnapped, or a family emergency had occurred. Ranma didn't have to guess at which. He sighed and looked around the first floor again. To his surprise, Nabiki had descended the stairs on feet as quiet as cat's paws, and regarded him coolly therefrom.

"Hey, Nabiki," he said, managing a weak half-grin. "Where is everyone?" She stared at him for a long time before she spoke.

"Mousse left a few minutes ago," she said softly. "He said that he was going to tell Ukyou. If you hurry, you might still beat him there, and save things with one of your fiancees." Ranma's heart sunk, and he understood exactly what Mousse was doing: he was getting revenge for what he'd seen. A part of him wanted to turn and run, and try to spare Ukyou's feelings, but the larger part of him knew that doing so would ruin things with Akane forever, if indeed they could still be salvaged now.

"How... how's Akane?" he managed. Nabiki's expression softened a bit.

"About like you'd expect," she said. "You really fucked up this time, Saotome. Literally." Ranma hung his head. "I don't know why you bedded the Amazon, and I don't really care, Ranma. I _do_ know that you hurt my little sister in the worst way you could have."

"Is... is there any way...?" he asked weakly. Nabiki shook her head.

"I doubt it," Nabiki said. "Want a bit of free advice?" she asked. Ranma raised an eyebrow but didn't comment.

"What?" he asked.

"If you ever had any feelings for Akane," Nabiki said, "Go up there. Face her. Let her scream and shout and hate you until she's all screamed out, and then leave." Nabiki paused. "Just don't fight back. Please. Please don't hurt my sister any more." Ranma sighed, then nodded sadly. He moved to pass Nabiki and climb the stairs, but she stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

"Right up until the end there, you were a pretty good guy," Nabiki said. "I would have been happy to have you as a brother before today."

"Thanks," he said weakly. "I'll try to remember that." The stairs towered before him, and Ranma climbed them. As he rose, he began to hear, faintly at first and then more clearly, the sounds of Akane's bitter weeping. At the top of the stairs, he made out, but could not understand, Kasumi's voice. He stood in front of Akane's door for what felt like the longest time, but could not bear to knock. After a while, the door cracked open of its own accord and Kasumi slipped out of her sister's room. She shut the door behind her, the little duck nameplate clattering.

"Hey," he managed, his voice a whisper. Ranma noticed that the left shoulder of Kasumi's dress had been soaked. She regarded him coolly, wet tear-tracks clear on her face. After a minute of this, she spoke.

"How could you?" she asked, and the question was like a slap across his face. She said nothing more, but shook her head and left for the stairs. Ranma sighed, and finally mustered enough courage to knock on Akane's door. It slammed open almost instantaneously. Behind it was the image he'd dreaded—Akane's face was red and puffy, her eyes watery, and her whole face was drenched in tears.

"_You_," she growled, her voice full of hatred. Ranma winced, but stood his ground. Akane's open hand swept around like a hurricane, and the slap sent him reeling. He recovered, and stood silently as another came, and then another.

"You bastard!" Akane shouted as the blows fell. "You asshole!"

"Akane, I-" Ranma began, but another blow silenced him.

"Shut the hell up!" she howled in horrible pain and rage. "Why'd you choose her? Why? Wasn't I good enough?" With each question, another blow, each weaker than the last.

"Akane, I didn't choose Shampoo. I don't even like her!" Ranma attempted. Akane's eyes steeled.

"Bullshit!" she shouted, and this time struck him with a closed fist. Ranma staggered back, but made no attempt to dodge. "You expect me to believe that you'd sleep with someone you hate, but you won't even tell me that you _like_ me? You're a fucking coward!"

"Hey! There's more to it than that!" Ranma protested, his blood rising.

"You're a coward!" Akane repeated. "You make your choice and you're not even man enough to be honest about it!" She sneered at him and continued. "And to think I used to think that you were half a man," she snarled. "You're not even that. You're not a man at all. Your wreck of a _father_ has more honor than you do!" Ranma's body reacted as though she'd punched him in his gut, the force of her words striking home hard. Akane pressed her advantage. "I just wish that the kettle had gotten crushed at Horai-san, so that your body could show just how manly you _really_ are. I'm sure your mother would have made you commit seppuku then, and we'd all be better off. I'd sure be a hell of a lot happier!" The bottom dropped out of Ranma's world at the sight of Akane's rage-filled face and heartfelt words. Akane sensed this somehow, and her last words were a sharp whisper.

"I'd rather marry Pantyhose Tarou than you," she hissed. Ranma's heart shattered, and he couldn't bear to take any more. He turned and ran, the reflex of the Saotome Secret Technique taking over. "That's right! Run!" Akane shouted after him as he leapt out a window. "Run like the coward you are!" She kept screaming after him, but distance and his own tears quickly rendered her words indecipherable. Ranma ran and ran, without aim and without thought, hating himself from the bottom of his heart and praying only that he could lose himself so completely that even he would never be able to find himself again.

--A/N--

So, we finally arrive at the heart of things. It's taken me a while to get here—a little longer than I thought it would—but I'm happy with the way that things are going. Certainly, the story has changed a bit from where I thought I'd go with it, but I like the changes. I am happy to note that, while some of you came pretty close to the story of what went on here, none of you really got things directly on. Remember, Ranma may have chosen Shampoo of his own free will, but that doesn't mean that he wasn't coerced.

And yes, a two of the items in Cologne's possession are nods to a couple of the more awesome classic Ranmafics out there. If you haven't read Hearts of Ice (she finally finished the last chapter!) or Meiyo Ai Sochite Nikushimi, you really should.

A few people have been complaining that the last two chapters have been deflating some of the tension of the story. My response is... well, yeah. They were supposed to. The story is out of chronological order, and there's only a chapter or two after this left. The climax was in chapter three, and in a different storytelling setup, this might have been the first chapter. I wanted to do something a little artsy, so there. If it really bugs you that much, you probably didn't like Pulp Fiction or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind either, which means that the real bottom of things is that you're not a big fan of this style of storytelling. That's fair. I am a fan, and I'm the one that sat down to write, so I'm entitled to a little flair of the proverbial pen.

A final note. Tomorrow, I'll be receiving my Master's of Arts degree, after two years of brutally hard work. I'm excited as can be, and am really looking forward to beginning my Ph.D. studies this fall. It's another five years of the same level of work or more, but it's also a chance to step into a much more rarefied world; after this semester, I'm finally beginning to feel like I belong at that level, too. Wish me luck!


	7. Family

Disclaimer: I don't own any of this.

The Lady of the Mountain

by: Flashfyre5

Chapter 7: Family

Afterward, Ranma and Akane shared a long silence. He had not expected his own explanation at the end of it, the simple voice that he'd given to the torturous moment that had set him on this path. It wasn't something that he'd ever really thought about—after all, he'd come to the mountain to bury that past, to escape it as completely as he could. It... unnerved him to think that his escape itself might very well be a part, perhaps the most important part, of a life that he thought he'd abandoned.

She, on the other hand, felt her insides crumbling. As the years had passed and she'd come to terms with the fact that Ranma was not and had never been the pervert that she'd once taken him to be, a large part of her had surrendered to the seemingly-simple truth that Ranma must have slept with Shampoo because he loved the purple-haired warrior woman. He may very well have loved Akane as well, but the sex had represented a monumental thing to her, a decision that had been meant to end the mad year of engagements that had plagued them all. Hearing Ranma's perspective, and especially the reasons for what he'd done, was a terrible disillusionment. Akane licked her lips.

"Mousse never mentioned you or Shampoo crying," she managed softly. Ranma nodded.

"He never could see very well, even with the glasses," Ranma agreed. "Besides, they're made for his human eyes. They're worse than useless when he's a duck." Akane nodded, and there was silence again.

"I-" they both started at once, and stopped. Akane blushed, and Ranma laughed.

"You first," he said. Akane gathered her courage again.

"I know that I apologized before," she said, "but-"

"Don't," Ranma interrupted. "You got pissed and overreacted. Of course you overreacted. You _always_ overreacted." Akane's eyes began to fill with tears at Ranma's harsh words. He winced. "Gah, I didn't mean it like that," he said, and put a muscled hand on her shoulder. He bit his lip for a minute, then tried again. "What I mean was that I should've known better. Sure, you blew your top, but I woulda too. I've been thinking about that day with Cologne for fifteen damn years, and I can't even begin to tell you how big I screwed up. You got mad, but it was really all my fault."

"But I didn't give you a chance to explain," Akane said, her despair clear in her voice. Ranma shook his head.

"So? You'd just gotten cheated on by your fiancee," he shrugged. "What sane person woulda given me a chance to explain? I got what I deserved outta that."

"But..." Akane tried, but found that she had nothing to say. Ranma smiled, just a bit.

"I shoulda come and told you about it before," he said, voice thick with certainty and regret. "I had four hours to set things up so that people knew what was gonna happen and why, and I blew it. I sat there for a half hour and thought about all the ways that having Shampoo gone was gonna make things better, and it blinded me to everything else. I just took Cologne's word that things'd stay a secret." He laughed a bit and shook his head. "It was Nerima. Of _course_ someone'd find out. I sure as hell lived there long enough to know that."

"I probably wouldn't have listened," Akane admitted.

"Then I woulda told Nabiki, and Ucchan, and Kasumi, until someone started listening," Ranma said. He thought for a moment. "Or I could've gotten Cologne to tell you all about the plan. You woulda been pissed, but you would've also seen the backside of Shampoo forever in a week's time. I think that would've gone a long way toward making stuff better." Akane nodded a bit, even if she wasn't so sure, and became increasingly aware of Ranma's hand on her shoulder. He seemed to remember after a bit, and dropped it to his side again.

"What were you going to say?" Akane asked.

"Actually," Ranma said sheepishly, glancing out the window into the night sky beyond the little house. "I was gonna apologize too." Akane smiled a bit.

"How about we both just say that we screwed up and call it even?" Akane asked, holding out a hand. Ranma looked at it, thought a bit, then nodded.

"I don't think it's exactly fair, but it's a deal," he agreed, and clasped her hand. They shook once, firmly, and the almost oppressive atmosphere that had hung over them both since Ranma had begun his story seemed to lift a little.

"So," Ranma said with exaggerated cheerfulness. "I'm dead tired. We were up late last night, and I didn't get much sleep. I'm heading to bed." He arched his back, stretching, then rose.

"I'll be in in a bit," Akane said. There was still a half-bowl of stir fry from dinner sitting on the table next to her left hand, long forgotten after Ranma's long story. Still, she'd been working out all day, and her stomach was still empty; that would have to be remedied before she could sleep, and Akane had never cared for cold stir fry. Ranma padded off to the bedroom and slid the door closed behind him.

Akane walked over to the pantry. After a few minutes of thinking, she took a small jar of Ranma's pickles, opened it, and took a bite out of a small spear. She blinked in surprise at the delectable vegetable, and looked again at the little treat.

"He wasn't kidding," she muttered to herself, and finished the spear in two quick bites. Another followed it, and then a third, before she slowed some and began to think again. Despite her agreement with Ranma over their shared past, hearing his side of that day had changed everything for her in a way, she realized, that she simply couldn't ignore. Akane pulled herself on top of the kitchen counter near the sink and chewed slowly on another pickle.

Sex with Shampoo had been a decisive act, as Akane had always thought, but his choice had been her. The fact that he'd been willing to go to such lengths to settle things, not just over the short term, as he had done so many times before, but permanently was already haunting her, the idea dancing around the outside of every thought she had. Akane winced in pain as she bit into her finger—she'd finished the fourth pickle without noticing. A fifth replaced it, and she re-capped the jar. She dropped down from the countertop, hauled out Ranma's cooler, and put the jar in to keep them fresh.

She ate her last pickle slowly. As she did, she leaned against the kitchen counter and stared at the door to their shared bedroom. Something stirred within her, something all too familiar and far too dangerous. Akane quashed it as best she could, but she knew very well that her body would not quiet itself so easily. She wanted Ranma, wanted him in a way that she hadn't wanted anything or anyone in all the years since her meditation training with Shodai-sensei had helped her to face her private demons and tame them, if imperfectly. Now they raged free again, and images of what she could do with, and to, Ranma consumed her. A traitorous part of her argued that, since sex had ruined everything, sex might be able to fix things between them. She tried to focus on the pickle, but it was gone and with it, her excuse to stay outside of the bedroom.

With a sigh and as much focus as she could muster, Akane opened the bedroom door and slipped inside. Ranma already lay asleep, half of his body sprawled against the exterior wall that his bed shared a wall with. Akane shucked her clothes, then pulled on a large shirt, one that would've been just a bit loose on her former male form but was far too big for her female one. Though she still held many reservations, Akane closed her eyes, took the edge of Ranma's bedding and, in one swift movement, pulled it up and slipped in.

Ranma awoke immediately as Akane joined him in bed. Before he could react, Akane wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled herself close, head burrowing against his chest. He held a panicked pose for a few long seconds before he said anything.

"Akane, what're you doing?" Ranma asked.

"I want to sleep here tonight," she said softly. There was a silence.

"I thought that you didn't love me," Ranma said cautiously.

"I don't," Akane said. "But I think that maybe I could." The silence was longer this time, and it was Akane that eventually broke it. "Did you ever... you know, after Shampoo?"

"No," he said, shaking his head softly above hers. It was a sensation that she'd felt, and enjoyed, countless times before, but it felt different this time, as different as the sun was from the moon. "Are you... do you want to...?" he tried unsuccessfully. Akane kissed him, firmly, on the lips. Ranma stiffened for a few moments, then began to relax.

"Shut up," she said, breaking the kiss, and closed her eyes. Although it was, by far, the hardest thing she had ever done, Akane settled into Ranma's arms and slowly began to drift off to sleep. After a long, perplexed time, Ranma followed her.

* * *

Ranma woke early, as he always had, and looked down at the woman that had crawled into his bed last night. It was... different than he thought it'd be. For one, it was more painful. Akane's slumber might have grown calmer over the years, but it couldn't possibly have grown _that_ much calmer. His shoulder smarted, and his neck felt like it had a crick in it that'd take all day to work out. Still, she was calm now, in the last few minutes before false dawn would break over the mountains, and the ghostly gray non-light made her look like an extra in a horror movie. She was, Ranma decided, still quite beautiful.

He carefully extricated himself from the bed via a combination of judo and gymnastics, executing a perfect landing from a handstand braced on the frame of his bed. She stirred a bit, but didn't wake. Ranma took the opportunity to look at her for a few more minutes, thinking, trying to identify the subtle wrongness that he sensed. Eventually, he gave up, and slipped out of the room silently.

Akane waited a full minute before she opened her eyes. In truth, she had awoken before Ranma had, and had felt the oddness, the... wrongness that Ranma had felt as well. She had known exactly what it was, and despaired. Still, she pretended to sleep, if for no other reason than to see what Ranma would do when he woke. If, she had hoped, he didn't feel the same way she felt that morning, there might be a passing chance... instead, he had vanished from the bed like a spirit, and that last vestigial hope had vanished with him.

When Ranma finally began to make enough noise in the kitchen that she could be certain he wouldn't hear her, Akane let herself weep the bitter tears that's she'd held back since she'd awoken.

* * *

The sense of wrongness was back, Ranma observed, when the two shared dinner that evening. Akane had spent all day in the practice fields again, and had very nearly mastered the basic form of the morisenken to the point where she could use it at a moment's notice in battle. Another day's work and she'd have it; after that, she could work on developing some of the advanced forms that the technique would enable. They'd sparred that afternoon, but her heart hadn't been in it, and she'd left to continue her practice halfway through the fight.

Akane's behavior perplexed Ranma, and it was perhaps for that reason that he didn't examine his own feelings more carefully. He'd never seen her like this; in some senses, she was acting like a very quiet Ryouga. He could feel the depression sloughing off of her, but there was something else behind it, something that he couldn't put his finger on. As he munched on that evening's fare—vegetable tempura—Ranma considered asking her about it, but quickly decided against doing so. Frankly, they'd spent a lot of time talking in the past couple of days, and he was quite tired of the long, difficult conversations that had become almost standard between them. Articulation had never been his strong suit. He chewed on the thought for a bit, then decided that he'd be better off just doing something about her depression instead. A plan began to form.

As such, scarcely ten words passed between the two that night. They slept separately.

* * *

Akane found a little note tacked into the front door with a pushpin the next morning. Ranma had risen earlier than she had, and there was no sign of him around the farm aside from the note. It read as follows:

Hey,

I'm gonna be out today. See ya at dinner. Come hungry.

It was signed with a little drawing of a horse, and Akane couldn't help but laugh. It was still early, and Ranma had apparently left her alone for the day. She thought for a minute, and then decided that this called for a long bath. Within five minutes, she had stripped, scrubbed, rinsed, and inserted herself into the interior onsen. The scalding heat soothed her mentally more than it did physically, and she savored it.

Today would be better, Akane decided. Yesterday had been a day of mourning, for what had been and for what might have been. The sadness of her reality had weighed on her heart, but the crucial moment had passed. She hurt, yes, but the pain was already dulling.

She shifted in the tub and, on a whim, slipped into the morisenken. It came easily now, and she was surprised to notice that it didn't stir the waters of the hot spring at all. She released the technique and shifted a bit.

The question now was what she should do—it was the very last question she would have to face here, she knew, and it only arose because all her other questions had been laid to a firm rest. She considered several different options. After about a half hour, she pulled herself from the hot spring and toweled herself off, having made no real progress.

After a light breakfast, she removed herself to the training fields. Two long kata later—a light warmup, but one that she enjoyed, for the simple beauty of the forms—she began her training with the morisenken again. While she was getting better and better at the base form, she knew that the technique left a great deal of potential open space, an area for growth and experimentation that would take her years to develop. Just learning how to breathe while maintaining the morisenken would take her months, she knew instinctively. It was at once exciting and intimidating.

Akane left off her training around noon. There was still plenty for her to do, but the question of what she should do about Ranma had begun to weigh on her again. This time, she made her way over to the obsidian boulder, sat on it, and crossed her legs. Slowly, she began to meditate.

Time passed.

When Akane opened her eyes again, hours had passed. The sun had dipped low in the western sky, washing the few clouds near it in hues of orange and pink. It was beautiful, and she enjoyed the view for a few minutes before she rose. The meditation had been good—she had her answer. Tomorrow, then. It wouldn't do to put it off any longer.

The house was lit from within when Akane returned; she could see Ranma's shadow flickering as he moved around the kitchen inside. She smiled, remembering his note from earlier, and entered.

"Hey," Ranma greeted her from the kitchen when she entered. Akane gasped in surprise at the scene arrayed in front of her.

The usual rice-pot had been set out on the counter, and Ranma was scooping a handful out. He shaped it with his hands, slapping his cupped palms together with a popping noise. When he was satisfied, he took a strip of thick-sliced but still small fish from the pile that lay near the red snapper from which it had come. Near the snapper's carcass was a dismembered octopus and the shells of several shrimp. Ranma carefully placed the strip of fish onto the rice, then secured it in place with a thin strip of seaweed. The piece of sushi joined several mates on a platter that Ranma had almost finished assembling. He began another piece.

"This must have cost you a fortune!" Akane managed. Ranma laughed.

"Why pay when you can go catch 'em for free?" he asked, forming another bit of rice. "It's only about an hour and a half to the ocean with the kazesenken."

"You caught all this?" Akane asked, sitting at the table.

"Yup," Ranma grinned. "The octopus put up a pretty good fight, but nothing the world's greatest martial artist couldn't handle." He laughed, and Akane joined him. The last piece of sushi finished, Ranma washed his hands then brought the platter over. Balanced on his head was a little plate of freshly-grated wasabi.

"What brought this on?" Akane asked. Ranma set the platter down, then slid the wasabi saucer down his arm and onto the table.

"You seemed kinda down last night," Ranma shrugged. "I remembered that you always used to like sushi, so I figured I'd make some." Akane shook her head and took a piece of shrimp sushi.

"Only you," she said, but her smile didn't leave her face.

"What?" Ranma asked wryly. He gobbled down a piece of octopus sushi and grabbed a second.

"You decided to make sushi," Akane explained, "so you flew out to the ocean with a martial arts technique, wrestled an octopus and a fish into submission, and then flew back." She laughed. "Who else could or would do something like that?" Ranma shrugged bashfully and bit into his second piece of sushi.

"Well, is it any good?" he asked.

"You're no sushi chef, but it's tasty," Akane said. They ate for a while in silence.

"You mind me askin' what had ya down yesterday?" Ranma eventually asked. Akane smiled wanly.

"I realized something," she said. A piece of red snapper was devoured.

"What?" Ranma asked when she didn't elaborate. Akane hesitated, hand hovering over the platter, then sagged a bit. In that moment, every day of her age showed.

"Yesterday morning," she began slowly. "When you got out of bed and looked at me..." She paused, looking for the right words. "You weren't watching me out of fondness or love or anythng like that, were you?" Ranma was startled by her question, but he gave it a moment's thought before he answered.

"No," he admitted.

"Why, then?" she asked. Ranma thought some more, and ate another piece of octopus.

"I don't know," he finally said. "Something felt wrong... weird. I don't know how to explain it." Akane nodded sadly.

"I do," she said, "because I felt it too." She drew a deep breath and expelled it before continuing. "You're attracted to me, right?" Ranma nodded cautiously. "And I think you know how attracted I am to you," Akane added. Ranma shrugged a bit bashfully.

"The problem," Akane said after a moment, "is that our bodies are telling us one thing, but our hearts are telling us something else. Our whole time together here has been full of pain and stress and emotion, and that's not something that you can build a working relationship on. The weirdness..." Akane paused sadly. "The weirdness is the death of a romance. It happens when two compatible people have too much between them to love anymore." She sighed sharply and looked away. "I've been through this sort of thing a few times." Ranma considered this for a long time, and eventually nodded.

"Yeah, I think you're right," he said. They looked at each other, the weirdness swelling. "So, what's the plan?"

"I'm going to leave for home tomorrow morning," Akane said. "I have what I came for, or at least as much of it as I'm going to get. I've been on the road for nine years. I miss Daddy."

"That quick?" Ranma asked.

"What more is there to stay for?" Akane asked, shrugging. "If I stay, things'll only get worse between us, and you can't help me with the morisenken any more. I want to leave while we're still on good terms with each other." She paused, and when she spoke again, it was very soft. "I want my last memory of you to be a good one this time." She looked at the sushi platter. "Something like this." Ranma didn't have anything to say to that.

"I thought you said that you could love me again," Ranma said, almost accusingly. Akane winced.

"I think that maybe I could," Akane said. "Someday. Not here. Not now. This place is full of pain and hard memories for me. Even if we left together, I think it'd haunt me." She paused. "You deserve better than that."

"Says you," Ranma sniped. He took a moment and, eyes closed, visibly calmed himself. "I really don't give a damn about this weirdness crap. All I know is that if you're willing to give it a try, I am." His offer hung in the air, and the allure of it drew Akane in ways that she had been totally unprepared for. She opened her mouth, and for an instant, a frenzied acceptance nearly spilled out.

"Ask me again sometime," Akane said. "When time and space has given us the chance to heal a bit."

"Why not?" he asked. Akane took a long time to answer.

"Because," she said, "if you and I were together, I'd need it to be forever." She paused, biting her lower lip. "Because you mean too much to me, good and bad. Because," she added, her voice tiny, "I don't think that I could survive losing you this time." Ranma rocked backwards, and for the first time he began to truly understand what his affair with Shampoo had done to Akane... and what it had almost done, perhaps had very nearly succeeded in doing, that she had never discussed. He could see the warning in her eyes, mingled with the unshed tears that had begin to crowd into them, and did not dare to ask.

"Okay," he agreed. The two were silent for a few more minutes, and then began to eat again. The platter was cleared of fish in fairly short order, and not another word was exchanged between the two for the duration. They sat there afterward for a time. Eventually, Akane rose and began to walk toward the bedroom.

"Before you go," Ranma said suddenly, and Akane stopped. "Let's fight one last time. For real." Akane turned to face him.

"You sure you can handle me?" she asked, a rakish grin creasing her face despite the more volatile emotions that hid behind it. Ranma returned the grin with a devilish look.

"Ranma Saotome doesn't lose to anyone," he said confidently. "Especially not uncute, musclebound tomboys." Akane's eyebrows shot up at the unexpected verbal jab, but couldn't help but be encouraged by Ranma's playful tone.

"Careful, or I'll pull out the mallet right here," she threatened, her own tone equally playful.

"Go ahead and try," Ranma grinned, hopping to his feet. "You couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, let alone me." Akane dove at him. He spun out of the way and out the front door, leaving Akane to crash into the dinner table and the remains of their food. The table collapsed under her weight, dishes and soy sauce flying everywhere. She rolled quickly and leapt out the window, which Ranma had left open for ventilation. Akane landed lightly and chased after Ranma, who was already making his way toward their sparring grounds. They ran for a few minutes under the bright light of the moon and the stars of the milky way. The sky was cloudless and clear, but neither Ranma nor Akane paused to appreciate it.

When Akane arrived at the training grounds, Ranma had taken up a more aggressive variation of his easy stance. Akane struck a kempo stance, the same that she had used to open their very first fight together.

"I say screw the warm-up stuff," Ranma proposed.

"All right," Akane grinned, and stomped the ground hard, using a combination of martial arts turf wars and the bakusai tenketsu. The earth under Ranma's feet warped, and he had just enough time to sway backwards before a spray of small rocks blasted upwards from the ground underneath him. The grapeshot mostly missed him, and he turned the sway into a cartwheel; as he came out of it, a sharp, focused blast of ki shot out from each hand and toward Akane. They briefly illuminated the battlefield in a sharp blue before they were disintegrated by Akane's morisenken.

In the few moments of pause that the morisenken demanded, Ranma charged. Akane took his first flying kick to her forehead, the morisenken holding her immovably in place. The pain of the attack blossomed, but she ignored it. Ranma rebounded off of her, striking her chin with his other foot as he flipped backward. Akane took the blow, and then dropped the morisenken in the moment afterward. Ranma had no chance to see or stop the sharp two-fisted punch that caught him in the back, and the force of it sent him flying backwards like a fired cannonball.

Partway through his flight, Ranma whisked into the kazesenken. His momentum carried him harmlessly through the obsidian boulder, after which he flew upward into the night sky. Akane tracked his progress and fired a ki blast of her own—this one the warped purple of ambivalence—but missed him by a fair margin. She tried again, and while this one was nearer, only missing Ranma by about a foot, it gave Ranma the opportunity to fire back with a ki blast of his own. Akane was forced into the morisenken again, and the blast dissipated, but Ranma again took the opportunity to punish her—this time with a punch to her solar plexus.

Akane exhaled a gout of flame after Ranma as he flitted away, insubstantial again, but he was simply too quick for such a tactic. Perhaps the only good that the flamethrower did was to ruin both his and her night-vision; for a few seconds, hostility ceased as their vision cleared.

"You should really give up now," Ranma gloated from overhead. "You can't get me while I'm using the kazesenken—you can't get close enough for your ki attacks to hit me before I dodge, and I can get in and punish you every time you use the morisenken. If you can't fly, you can't beat me." Akane's eyes narrowed, even if Ranma couldn't possibly have seen them.

"You know," Akane said, "I never told you who trained me until I could beat Herb." She crouched, and managed to locate Ranma's faint outline above.

"Oh yeah? Who?" Ranma asked.

"Saffron," Akane grinned, and a great gout of flame erupted from her feet. She roared into the air like a rocket, a fiery contrail streaking behind her. Ranma dodged desperately, but Akane's technique imparted her with a terrible speed. She streaked through his insubstantial legs harmlessly, but the ki-fueled flames that propelled her scorched Ranma's shins. The bottom half of his pants burned and fell from the rest of him, becoming physical again as they did. Akane streaked onward, turning ponderously under the force of her own acceleration.

"What the fuck!" Ranma exclaimed, both at the technique and at Akane's claim. He twisted and blindly shot ki blasts after Akane as she turned, the light of the fire having ruined his night-vision again. One got lucky, and Akane had to drop the flight technique and bobble wildly in order to avoid it. Ranma lobbed another two blasts at her falling form, one of which struck home. She tumbled and struck the ground hard. Ranma watched warily, not daring to approach.

"Houou Tachiagatta!" Akane cried, and rose into the air again in a fiery pillar. This time, Ranma had enough space to dodge, and as Akane passed by, he spiraled quickly around her contrail.

"Hiryuu Oriyochi Ha!" he countered, striking into the heart of the superheated air with a corkscrewing uppercut. A tornado erupted, and the tight convective vacuum formed by the tight spiral and Akane's even tighter flames struck Akane with the force of a dropped bomb in reverse. At first, seeing the almost-horizontal twister forming behind her, Akane dumped ki into the fires that propelled her. Unfortunately, as she quickly realized, this fueled the tornado's expansion to a terrible degree, and the massive low pressure drew her in despite her best efforts. As she was about to be swallowed by the terrible thing, Akane dropped the houou tachigatta. She tumbled into the heart of the giant twister uncontrollably, and the ki-fueled winds sliced her skin and sucked at her ki.

In a moment of prescience, Akane drew up the morisenken. For a short second, her descent halted, and she froze in midair. Afterward, gravity reasserted its dominance over her warped bubble of local reality, and she continued to fall, but the fury of Ranma's technique was greatly reduced; still, she was cut, and still she bled, but without any sensible ki to draw upon, Akane could already see that the tornado was beginning to destabilize.

Ranma must have seen this as well, because a rapid series of punches crashed into her kidneys as she fell. Trapped in the morisenken, Akane couldn't respond, and a second series of punches hammered into her spine. She caught a glance of Ranma's insubstantial form for a moment before a spinning axe kick smashed into her ribs and sent her crashing to the ground. Still insubstantial, and as such unaffected by the winds of the failing tornado, Ranma flitted down after her. Blow after blow followed, which Akane could only bear without retaliation or defense; if she dropped the morisenken now, the tornado would stabilize again and finish the fight on its own.

By the time that Ranma's twister finally fell apart, Akane had well and truly lost the fight. Ranma had hammered on her every vulnerable spot for over a minute, and he knew as well as she did that she couldn't possibly continue after such a beating. Akane dropped the morisenken and held her hands up in a shielding gesure.

"I give, I give," she croaked. "Uncle, already." Ranma, breathing heavily. dropped out of the kazesenken and kneeled next to her, wincing at the pain from his freshly-burned legs.

"You okay?" he asked, placing a hand on her shoulder. Akane nodded.

"Just bruises. I'll be fine in the morning," she said, and simply lay in the little crater that she'd created as a result of Ranma's attacks. Most of her body was telling her rather emphatically that she'd really rather not move right now, and she was inclined to obey. Ranma nodded and slouched back.

"Damn, you're good," he said, and Akane grinned, despite her pain.

"Told you," she said. Ranma chuckled and patted her shoulder again.

"Saffron?" he asked after a minute of rest. "_Really_?" Akane nodded.

"He's weird this time around," she explained. "The phoenix people kidnapped a Buddhist monk when he was little, and made him help while they were raising Saffron." She paused for breath. "Now he's equal parts monk and maniac. He thinks he's the reincarnation cycle in physical form. One minute he'll be quoting Siddhartha and the next he'll attack you without mercy. He taught me for the better part of a year and I still don't understand him." Ranma thought about this.

"I don't get it," he said. "Why'd he help you?"

"He says that he has to deal with the karma of his last death," Akane said. "He still remembers all of his past lives, sort of, but he's got this whole weird interpretation of his place in the world because of all of the sutras that they filled his head with." Akane thought for a bit. "He's really good with ki, though."

"And he's looking for me?" Ranma asked. Akane nodded.

"Apparently, for the same reasons as he wanted me me, though I'm not sure whether he'd rather help you or kill you," Akane said. "He almost killed me in training a couple of times. He's scary, even with this whole monk thing." She pushed herself to a sitting position, wincing at the pain. "Kiima found me wandering around the outskirts of Musk territory after Herb beat me up the first time, and came back with a platoon. I did better than I did last time, but they still kidnapped me again," she grinned sheepishly. Ranma grinned back.

"What is it with you and weird princes anyway?" Ranma teased, and both laughed, even if the laughter was more subdued than it might have been. Afterward, the two shared an easy silence, the weirdness that had hovered between them gone for a time.

"Help me up," Akane asked. "I want to get to bed. It's going to be an early morning tomorrow." Ranma pulled her to her feet, and together the two made their way back to Ranma's house.

* * *

Akane slept later than she'd intended that night, perhaps on account of her injuries, or perhaps simply because she was exhausted. Regardless, she awoke from a deep sleep to find that Ranma had already risen. She stood and stretched; the injuries that Ranma had inflicted on her still smarted, but a night's sleep had done a world of good. As she arched her arms over her head, Akane noticed her own scent and grunted in disgust. She hadn't bathed after the fight last night. That would have to be remedied if she planned on using public transportation, which was hard to avoid in Japan. She peeked out into the main room and, finding no sign of Ranma, stripped and grabbed her bathing gear.

When she opened the door to the bathroom Ranma, soaking in the heat of his bath, glanced in her direction. His eyes widened a bit in surprise, then he looked away.

"Sorry!" he said, cringing. Akane blinked once, then laughed. After a moment, Ranma relaxed and joined her mirth.

"Didn't we do this already?" Akane asked, as she sat down and began to scrub herself.

"I guess so," Ranma agreed, and relaxed again. "Turned out a bit differently this time."

"Don't get your hopes up, pervert," Akane teased, and lobbed her soap bar at Ranma. He dodged it easily.

"Who's a pervert, now?" Ranma asked skeptically. Akane laughed again.

"That's fair, I guess," she said, and rinsed herself off. In short order, she had joined Ranma in the hot spring, sighing in pleasure as she dipped into the steaming water. Ranma shifted a bit, and made a point of looking away. Akane just sank into the basin and closed her eyes.

"So, when are you gonna leave?" he asked.

"After I get out of here and pack," she answered. "I can get breakfast in town." Ranma nodded.

"You know, I've been thinking," he said after a few minutes.

"Oh? I'm surprised," she teased. Ranma kicked her softly under the water.

"Shaddap," he growled. "Anyway, I think that I'm gonna leave too." Akane opened her eyes in surprise.

"Leave? Isn't this your home?" Akane asked.

"That's what I've been thinking about," Ranma said. "And I think the answer's no. I thought it was my home, but it's really just a hiding spot." He paused. "I've never really had a home, except for your dad's place. This place... it was always just a means to an end. I never really liked farmin', and I hated being a girl all the time. Besides, now the whole place just reminds me of why I ran away in the first place." Akane nodded, thinking.

"Where are you going to go?" she asked.

"China," Ranma said firmly. Akane looked over and raised an eyebrow. "I'm way damn overdue to meet my daughter. I wanna see what kinda person she is. I want to train with her." He thought for a minute. "I want to learn how to be a dad, even if I didn't start out as much of one." Akane placed a hand on his arm and squeezed in sympathy.

"Are you going to meet Saffron?" Akane asked. Ranma nodded, but slowly this time.

"Yeah," he said. "He's as stubborn as I am, and if he's out for blood, I don't want it spilling over to anyone else. Better to go see him on my terms."

"Be careful," Akane said, and Ranma nodded. She hesitated for a minute, then spoke again. "Ranma, you should know something."

"What?" he asked.

"You saw how well I could control fire last night," Akane said. Ranma nodded. "Well, that's not really natural. Normal people shouldn't be able to do that sort of thing." Ranma looked at her quizzically. Akane sighed, then explained, "Ranma, surviving the Kinjakan changed me. Think about it for a minute—that thing's magical, and powerful enough to control Jusenkyo. Saffron said that it's a miracle that I survived, even as a doll. Most people would have been simply obliterated." She paused for a minute.

"The same sort of thing is true for the Gekkaja," she said, and let the statement hang in the air. Ranma thought about it, then his forehead creased.

"Are you saying that that thing changed me too?" he asked.

"You did freeze your body," Akane said. "It should have killed you. Think about it for a minute—water expands when it freezes, and your body is mostly tiny little bags of water. Using the Gekkaja to freeze yourself should have turned your body into red goo once it melted." Ranma considered this, and shifted uncomfortably.

"So, what'd it do to me?" he asked. Akane shrugged.

"I don't know," she admitted. "Even Saffron doesn't fully understand how the Kinjakan changed me, let alone the Gekkaja. All I know is that it lets me work with fire very easily, and that I don't burn anymore." Ranma shook his head.

"You know, I was just thinking the other day that I preferred the cold," Ranma chuckled. "Always figured it was left over from the full-body cat's tongue."

"Who knows?" Akane said. "Maybe it is, and you just got lucky with the Gekkaja. If Saffron's in a good mood, he might help you figure it out."

"And if he's in a bad mood?" Ranma asked.

"Run," Akane advised.

* * *

That evening, Akane entered her childhood home for the first time in almost a decade. It was quiet, much moreso than it had been when she'd left so many years ago, but the bits and pieces that had always made it her home were still there. The ancient wood smelled of varnish, oil and care, and the rice-paper screens snapped softly in the light wind. Her father's shoes were haphazardly strewn across the engawa. The fresh, new tatami mats still smelled of bleach.

Akane pulled off her heavy traveling pack and set it down in the engawa, and in that instant she knew that she never wanted to carry it again. The house wrapped around her like a warm, comforting blanket, filling up her heart and soothing her soul. When she'd left, it had been suffocating, a dreary reminder of her rocky past with Ranma. Now... now it was the home her mother had lived and died in, the house that she'd learned her first kata in, the place where she'd fallen in love for the first time. Even the painful memories seemed dulled. Akane smiled.

"I'm home," she called and, for the first time since Ranma had left, felt the truth of it.

--A/N--

And here we are, finally at the end of our little story. There might be more for us to look into—Ranma's trip to China, Akane finding her place at home again and so forth—but they were never a part of the story that I wanted to tell here. For me, this was always a story about Akane coming to terms with who she was and why she was that way and as such, those sorts of things are really outside of this story.

I suspect already that many of you will be upset that a Ranma/Akane pairing didn't happen here. Frankly... tough. I had never intended for this to end in a relationship between the two of them, and for the very reasons that I laid out here. What had to happen demanded pain and emotion and hardship, and romance, even when powered by history and a strong mutual attraction will wither in such ground. Akane is experienced enough to know this; even if she wants a relationship with Ranma, which she does, she's smart enough and, more importantly, self-aware enough to understand how quickly a relationship based on such a foundation would surely fail.

In truth, I have to admit, there _are_ the seeds of a sequel here. I'm not sure if I want to write it or not; in many ways, I really like where this one leaves off. On the other hand, there's all sorts of stuff that I set up that I didn't get to develop—for instance, the Nerima businesswoman that was looking for Ranma in the first chapter is actually _Nabiki_, and not out of any romantic interest—which I'm awfully tempted to explore. Additionally, Tao Hua is a real spitfire, and a character that I'd honestly like to write about. She was a bit of an extra in LotM, and I'm a bit sad about that. For now, at least, oh well.

Finally, I'd like to thank you all for your kind words and encouragement as I wrote this. It was, to say the least, a gas.

~Flash

--Translations--

Houou Tachiagatta- The Phoenix Rises

Hiryuu Oriyochi Ha- Flying Dragon Descent to the World Wave


End file.
